The art of over engineering

Nearing 6 months ago I set out on one of my days off to create a website to facilitate 3 goals:

1. showcasing my skills for potential employers
2. Sharing my music with my friends
3. starting a blog about nothing in particular

The first two of this list were checked off by whipping up a quick portfolio site with a nifty frontend wrapper to display my listening history from last.fm. I used tanstack start to do this as I fear the triangle man at nextjs and it is always a great opportunity to try a new technology to learn when doing a low risk project.

All three of these goals are small enough tasks which many people before me have taken on.

So what went wrong with the blog?

Defining the problem

When taking on this personal task I didn't handle it as if I were at work. Consulting stakeholders, data analysis to define what actually needs to be tackled to generate an adequate solution.

Where I ended up

Being driven by wanting to use the hottest technology options led me the poorest solution. I created a postgres database with neon and stored my images in vercel blob, created a markdown text editor that I had to login to use on my site with github SSO.

Lets circle back to the problem. I want the ability to create blog posts. Fullstop I didn't need a shitty editor I whipped up that crashed from many various combinations of special characters.

Now I can just commit .md files to my repo and use any other better text editor in existence. Problem solved.

No regrets I still had fun exploring whats out there and even this is still overkill, I really don't need react with all the SSR components going on, but this is the life I live.