Migrated to Jekyll
Software Engineering Team Lead and Director of Cloudsure
(Ported from my old blog called Thinky)
WordPress is a great platform to get a website up and running in no time. It offers great features as well as analytics. As a developer I felt frustrated as I needed to override a lot of things to get my page speed up. So I decided to migrate away from WordPress.
I chose Jekyll, a really cool static site generator built on Rails. Now I have everything in Git and am in full control with versioning.
I created thinky.co.za as an experimental brand to practice being Agile in a project of my own with the benefits of sharing my knowledge with others. Here is how things got rolling.
- I purchased a .co.za domain and simple Linux shared hosting plan via MWEB.
- Installed WordPress and configured MySql.
- Wrote some posts.
- Wanted a change so I investigated other blogging alternatives.
Things were a bit rushed in the beginning so after I spent a few hours playing around with Jekyll, I decided to get my Product Owner hat on and get the migration going. I wanted my deployments to be iterative so I created stories for an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). This was a lot easier because I got to decide what that was.
- Installed Ruby on Rails
- Created a Jekyll website in Atom
- I created a backlog in Trello
- Worked on a few of stories and deployed.
I think this is the most fun way to teach yourself a bunch of concepts. Find a project, make it yours and apply new techniques, technologies and methodologies so that you can learn more about them by applying them and making it visible to the world.