Simpler

October 24th, 2019

I just got done with publishing the latest iteration of this site. It looks a little more put together, especially on phones. For this iteration, I've moved to a new tech stack called GatsbyJS and boy, is it miles better than what I've been using in the past. Though it took some work to move to this new ecosystem, I'm reaping some good benefits including saving $60/year in hosting costs and being able to publish changes instantaneously. It feels really good to edit the code locally on my computer and push it to the cloud when I'm done. No more databases, no more servers, no more DNS routing. Just JavaScript and HTML.

The drive for simplification is part of a larger set of actions that have been taking place in my life lately. I'm letting go of a lot in an effort to make my life simpler. Friendships, business relationships, the amount of things I own, the schedule I maintain, all of that stuff became way to complicated for my liking. I wanted more control over my life and just like in Aesop's fable about the dude who couldn't get his hand out of the jar, I had to let go to move on. And that's kind of the way it should be, right? If you want things to be simpler, a great way to do that is to reduce the complexity of the system(s). Often times, that's putting the desire to help any and every person, to be everything to everybody, and to have everyone like you down. Take some of the weight off.