Building for Simplicity

Every project starts with a choice: how much complexity are you willing to carry? For this site, I chose the least amount possible — markdown files, static generation, no database. Here's why.

The Temptation of Infrastructure

It's easy to reach for a CMS. Contentful, Sanity, even a headless WordPress — they all promise flexibility. And they deliver it. But flexibility has a maintenance cost that compounds over time.

For a personal site that I want to last years, I asked: what's the simplest system that won't break when I'm not looking at it?

The Answer: Files in a Repository

Markdown files committed to git give you everything a CMS gives you, minus the moving parts:

• Version history — git log is your changelog
• Portability — move to any framework, any host
• No accounts — no login, no API keys, no expiring tokens
• Speed — there's nothing faster than pre-rendered HTML

The trade-off is that there's no visual editor, no drag-and-drop. You write in a text editor. For me, that's a feature, not a bug.

What Architecture Is Really About

I've learned that the best architectural decisions aren't about choosing the most powerful tool. They're about choosing the most appropriate one — the tool whose constraints match your actual needs.

A static site for a personal blog isn't a limitation. It's a design decision that eliminates an entire category of problems.