There has been more evolution in the software development space in the past 2 months than the past 8 years, and maybe the past 20. Ok that’s a little bit of hyperbole, but it’s hard to underestimate how fast things are changing and how they’re accelerating.
The ability to move software from idea to implementation has reached a point that’s almost unbelievable. Even at the best of times in the past, there were always obstacles, things to overcome, small tweaks that had to be made, libraries that weren’t ready to go, conflicts between versions, and so on and so on. And now, with agentic AI, these things work themselves out.
I decided as part of my own experience to go ahead and try to redesign my website. Part of this is the genesis of wanting to update it for a long time now.
I’m a big WordPress fan, and I have been for a long time. And if you’ve followed this site for a long time, you know I’ve gone back and forth to and from WordPress and then different implementations of generic vanilla HTML and JavaScript over the years. But recently, I’ve been exploring more of the terminal than I have in a long time.
And it’s convinced me that the friction that WordPress introduces into my ability to produce blog posts is not acceptable anymore. This isn’t a complaint about WordPress so much as it’s a reality of the current paradigm in which we find ourselves. WordPress is great in a lot of ways. But, if you’re posting only a few times each year, it’s probably not the right choice.
The number of plugins and the amount of risk associated with them coupled with the load time that the overhead of a WordPress site adds and the associated cost with running it on a hosting account means it’s time for a change. It doesn’t help that recently the hosting company that I’ve used for the past 25 years had an outage and in no way reached out proactively to address the situation with their customers. When I did reach out and try to get more information about it, I was actually chastised about storing backups in my web account only because I had named a folder “backups”. I felt dismissed, and after 25 years as a customer, I guess I expected better. I suspect a lot of technology vendors are gonna find themselves in a similar situation now that the friction of making software and doing things on your own is going to drop precipitously in the next few weeks and months.
I don’t think that the big software projects and platforms are going anywhere. I don’t think anyone is going to vibe code a version of Facebook that’s going to displace it. But I do believe that we may be entering a new golden age on the web where anyone with these tools will be able to create a website and cool things that they can host on their own. My website is now going to run on Cloudflare using a lot of their native tools. Beyond the cost of the domain itself, there’s not going to be a lot of expense associated with it. Why would there be?
Anyway, I hope you like the new site. And if you have any feedback, feel free to hit that contact link in the upper right-hand corner and shoot me a message. I’d love your feedback. And if you want to talk about AI, let’s do that.