Migrating to Bear Blog
I recently decided to give my blog a refresh and migrated it to the Bear Blog platform. In this short post I would like to explain the why of this migration and add few considerations on blogging and the internet itself.
First things first: why put some effort on the blog that is stale since a year or more? Well, this year I would like to double-down on my mission to share knowledge (more on it in this old post). Writing and sharing ideas through a blog is a nice way to spread knowledge of any form.
On top of that, I like writing and I believe it is a fundamental skill that everyone should master to progress in their career. If you are a Software Engineer like me, and you believe that what matters to you is only coding and technical knowledge, you are getting this wrong. Sorry. If you don't believe me - a random guy on the internet - at least listen to Paul Graham.
And no, please, don't use AI to write your content. Make it yours, do not flatten everything using some AI assistant. It will be not perfect, there will be typos, but at least it will have your style and personality.
The reason I chose Bear as a blogging platform is because it allows me to focus on writing and the content itself, and because I share the "no fluff" philosophy behind it. I guess everyone is aware of the enshittification of the internet, but to me it goes far than services getting worse over time. Everything now is so heavy and full of crap that makes me sick. So, supporting Bear to me means supporting a more healthy internet.
There is also a more technical reason on why I decided to move to a hosted platform for my blog. My previous "stack" was Hugo as a framework, and Netlify to host the blog using the free tier. All the content was hosted on GitHub, and there was a pipeline in Netlify building and publishing the new version of the site after every push. Neat, and at 0 cost.
There is one issue with that. The Netlify free tier gives you a limit on the bandwidth and other stuff. Not a problem if you have few readers a month like me. But, if some bored kid on the interned decides to target your website with a DDOS attack just to call himself a hacker, then you can quickly go over the free tier limit. And if you do, you cannot configure Netlify to stop serving the site. It will let you go over the free tier limits, paying the price for the extra. You get an email when you are approaching the limits, but what if you are sleeping while the attack is ongoing?
I know I may sound paranoid, but I discovered the "small" issue because I read of a guy that faced this and got a 100k dollar bill. I cannot find the source right now, but yeah, that can happen. I prefer to pay 50 bucks a year and sleep peacefully.
That's it! It was not that short as a post, after all...