This blog post is a reaction to The Static Site Paradox from Loris Cro
Loris hilights the paradox where people with completence in software end up with solutions that are cheaper and easier to maintain compared with people without such skills that end up being locked into Wordpress, webservers, caching layers, backends and so on. Its intuition is that it should be other way around.
It is a good prospective but I want to expand it a little bit. I do gardening and I bought a lawn mower this year. My provider is a small one that does a lot of repairs, it is not a shop, they fix tools then they end up salling them as well.
I like their approach because they do not start from fancy and new tools, easy to use, but impossible to repair, if you share their value you end up with a tool that is basic, solid and easy and cheap to repair, even by yourself. I am not an expert when it comes to engines, carburetors, gas and oils but I learned that at some point carburetors may get dirty and if you clean the nozzle you are back in full shape. Sometime I did it by myself.
Same when I visited the house of my electrician, or the reason why mechanics often pick cars that are strong and easy to repair vs models that are made of chips they can’t fix.
Experts know the cost of maintenance and they can optimize for that. I also know electricians who like domitics and IoT so they end up with expensive gear and get locked to sellers that makes them pay for every update. That’s fine as well, people usually have both personality, context is the driver.
I like to eat healthy and well cooked food that I can’t grow by my own and I do not have the skill to put together. Even if I grow my own things.
Users with no experince with software can’t optimize for technical simplicity. User experience, cost optimization (agency that can update worpdress are probably cheaper than agency doing custom static site because of the economy of scale), avoid vendor lock in and so on.
Something else that this article made me to realize is that I had a lot more fun and the possibility to experiment with something like Wordpress compared with something like GitHub Pages or a static site.
Not because I think Wordpress or PHP is superior, I think serving static pages is the solution for the web. It is the most friendly to use, green… Even with a CMS or a backend the end goal should be to serve static content as ealry as possible, compiling and caching. It can be in your FS as a static site does or in Redis, that’s not the point for me.
What I realized killed my enthusiasm for experimenting, building, learning in such context is in fact GitHub Pages or similar solutions. Because they made my life too easy and I got lazy.
Recently I decided to split my blog into a second one dedicated to my experience as developer, devops and so on, where I am trying to write on schedule, it is not doing as well as I would like so I am not sure for how long I will have the energy to go with that, do you want to help? please share it shippingbytes.com if you like what I write. But I deiced to build it with WordPress, in a VPC, with a low number of plugins (only one) a custom theme and so on.
Having a VPC justifyed a lot more experimentation, I am collaborating with a friend to develop a product for driving school I run a few other services that ok are not that useful and I can leave without but is that the point?
I realized that easy solution doze off my passion and my energy so do not feel stupid if you pay a few beers a month for serving yourself a static site if you can affort that. If you feel alone it is because you are in the wrong bubble and I can help with that!