Starting my personal blog in 2025: a journey of discovery

March 16, 2025
TL;DR: After wanting to start a blog for ages, I finally decided to commit to weekly writing to help complete my side projects. After exploring options, I discovered Cloudflare’s hosting capabilities and settled on using Markdown with pandoc as the ideal solution for my needs.

I’ve always wanted to start a personal blog, but I never had the courage to build one or try popular platforms like Medium or Substack. A few days ago while exercising at the gym, I had a realization: setting a weekly deadline to write about my recent activities would motivate me to accomplish more and potentially finish my side projects instead of abandoning them on GitHub. Perhaps I’ll finally open-source some of them. I grabbed my phone and began researching popular options. My requirements were straightforward:

The last requirement eliminated most blogging platforms (despite Substack’s interesting approach). I then realized I would need to host something myself, so I checked Cloudflare, my domain provider, for included hosting options. I discovered they support numerous web frameworks and offer automatic building and deployment from Git repositories. Among the frameworks listed, Hugo caught my eye, so I dove into the documentation. Unfortunately, everything seemed overly complex for my simple needs. I considered writing plain HTML files (which Cloudflare’s CDN supports), but creating raw HTML is just as tedious as learning a new tool like Hugo. I concluded that Markdown might be the ideal solution to focus on writing without HTML complexities. After exploring various tools, I discovered pandoc, which claims to be the leading converter between markup formats.

Here the full article on how to build a blog using pandoc.

What’s in the cosmo this week

  1. This super interesting video about using Docker with Nix. Reproducibility is such an underrated topic in software eng world, and distributing nixos in a docker container could brint the benefit of both world.
  2. A podcast episode featuring Mitchell Hashimoto discussing Ghostty.
  3. I’m becoming increasingly obsessed with the r/minilab subreddit every day.
  4. I’m still working on rebuilding my home lab around NixOS+K3s+Flux.