Pardon the Clutter
Obligatory "new website" article about the work to consolidate my content into a single place.
Originally published on . Last updated on .
Welcome to The New TED.DEV
If you’ve stopped by here before, you may have noticed that the domain TED.dev no longer redirects to tedmyoung.com, which is my old (and non-responsive, yucky) website. In fact, if you stopped by in the past couple of weeks, you might’ve noticed a single, lonely article, and nothing else. That’s because I redirected the domain thinking that I’d have the site ready quickly. Yep. 🤷♂️
Static Site Generation
A long time ago, I used WordPress, but always thought it was too awkward and slow. I moved to Publii (which is what tedmyoung.com is still running on as of June 2022), which churns out HTML, so is fast, but it was also awkward. I played with Gridsome, which is based on Vue.js, but is not actively developed and hasn’t gotten to a 1.0 release. I also don’t (yet?) need the power of a front-end framework like Vue. I’ve tried Hugo many times over the years, but something about it didn’t work for me. (It isn’t at 1.0 either, but is actively developed.)
I’ve had my eye on 11ty (“Eleventy”) for a while, and with its recent 1.0 release, I decided to give it a closer look. I had learned a lot about it from Andy Bell’s “Learn Eleventy from Scratch” course, which is now open source. And while Andy ported his 11ty-based site back into WordPress, I like the simplicity and control I now have with 11ty[1].
Goodbye Substack
My goal is to gather all the various (and dead) sites I’ve left strewn about the internet, and put them here. However, the main impetus behind the move is two-fold:
- Get my content off of Substack: I’m very much a believer in “own your platform” when it comes to content, and Substack was meant to be temporary anyway. Mainly, I needed to consolidate my email list to prepare for…
- Launching my self-paced course: “Refactoring to Hexagonal Architecture”! Shh! I haven’t officially announced it. To stay updated, subscribe to my newsletter here.
Not having a pleasant website for my writing has also meant I’ve been less motivated to write. Now I can write more, including about new courses that I’m excited about.
In the meantime, I’ll migrate all my past Substack newsletter articles to this site, and then start moving things from elsewhere and publishing new articles.
The Future
There’s still a lot of content to add, not just articles, but also information about my classes, technical coaching, etc. There’s also “design” work to do: larger excerpts for articles on the front page, a “better” front page, different fonts (now there’s a rat hole!), tweaks to the footnoting, etc. And internally, more 11ty shortcuts and plugins to help with things like images, etc. However, I now have a good foundation to build upon.
Community
Do you know I run a Discord community? It’s a place where folks discuss Java (and PHP and C#), object-oriented programming and design, unit testing, test-driven development (TDD), Hexagonal Architecture, and more. I’d always wanted a place where I could talk to folks about code and design at a deeper level than you’d find on places like Reddit. It also supports the “live coding” that I do on Twitch. If that sounds interesting, join us using this Discord invitation link: https://discord.gg/9XDfBSZ.
Not that it was easy to get to this point. In fact, aspects were much harder than expected. Ask me if you want to know more details, maybe I’ll write an article or two about the experience. ↩︎