I’m doing it again! I decided I wanted to reboot my site. I came back to the source code for my blog because I’m trying to figure out how to do the same things I did here but in SvelteKit. Lo and behold there is an unpublished post (now published) called Infinite Reinvention that recounts my experiences with this exact phenomenon of wanting to start over to make things better.

What I’m actually realizing as I try to replicate my custom hand-written static site builder in SvelteKit is how good this site builder actually is for me. I have a bunch of complex metadata going on for posts that I use to build an index for each tag and a listing of all the posts by date. All of this is done ahead of time and compiled down to a folder full of static HTML files. I was trying to figure out how I would do all of that in SvelteKit, but as I look at what I’ve already done here I can’t help but wonder why I’m trying to do this again from scratch. This site is good! I can just add to what I already have and it will be great.

This is the peril of being a software developer. I always want to make everything new and shiny, even if I’m not solving actual problems. It’s hard. It feels like… if I’m working on something I must be getting somewhere. That is fine for learning, but I have a tendency to spin my wheels and burn myself out on things I never even put in front of people. I wonder how many other people with the same career/hobby as me do this exact same thing.

What’s funny is I think I just got excited about SvelteKit. I recently redid my gym’s website with it, and for good reason. The site needed more pages and all I had before was a single-page site with some image assets linked. Adding additional pages brought up the need for shared headers and footers (templating), more advanced analytics and SEO tags on each page. All of that is a bit nontrivial if you’re just writing things by hand. I’ve tried to make multi-page sites with consistent layouts before via copy-and-paste and it really doesn’t lend itself to long term maintenance. So that left me with a couple choices; hand roll some template stuff myself or use an existing framework. In this case using the existing framework got the job done a lot faster.

I got really excited about SvelteKit because of how easy it was to optimize images, set up layouts and do routing for multiple pages. I think the excitement made me want to rewrite everything in it. But yeah… it turns out that what’s good for one project is not necessarily good for them all. And this site is fucking weird, to be honest. I have a listening section I’ve been on-and-off working on for a few years that is a hybrid of music library and blog. In the time I would spend rewriting this site and getting everything to work again in SvelteKit, I probably would be finished with that section.

So, yeah. Not going to reinvent this time. My notes from me-one-year-ago (exactly one year ago!) helped save me a lot of time. I’m glad I started writing this blog.