People worry about tooling because they don't want to create a future mess they have to unpick: or the process might be hard enough they just won't do it.

For my private blog for example, how to easily - as in drag and drop - insert images was a big thing that needed to work. So was reasonable code rendering.

I settled on the requirement "must be able to publish a Jupyter notebook" since that format roughly handles all those requirements while still being markdown mostly.

Then you have hosting: I want low touch so how whatever I pick interacts with that matters a lot too suddenly.

It still took some tweaking of Nikola[1] to get the process right for me, though not much.

Keep it simple doesn't help much if simple is actually just missing features that enable you to write efficiently and often (if that's what you want to do, I think I mostly just keep technical notes for myself).

[1] https://getnikola.com/

I spent a long time tinkering with the tooling, which meant that writing always took a back seat or was put off. As a transition, I decided to use Bear Blog [0] for writing, and when I eventually find a self-hosted solution that works for me, I'll just switch over. And Bear Blog is in line with my values, unlike so many other platforms.

[0]: https://bearblog.dev/

I also came with a similar resolution which is that building just for the sake of building will not motivate me to actually build.

I'm adding CSS, JavaScript, PHP, whatever, to my website because it's required to accomplish what I want. Not because my website must have all of that to be on par with what's whateverGPT is able to produce.

Building a CI pipeline which will automatically convert the linted markdown I'm pushing to a beautiful HTML blog post will surely be helpful to my technical growth.

But I know for sure that I won't have any motivation to do it without having written an actual post to share to the internet.

Reminded me of one of Paul Graham's maxims: "do things that don't scale"