Raise your hand if you’ve recently read or heard any variation of the following three sentences:
I just finished a two-week accelerated boot camp, quit my lousy low-paying job, and now I’m earning six figures. If I can do it, so can you!
I lost 50 pounds eating only broccoli and crème brûlée. Mushroom coffee was a revelation! If I can do it, so can you!
Three months ago, I was heavily depressed, but then I started staring at the sun and doing two micrograms of shrooms daily. I’m a new person now. If I can do it, so can you!
If your hand is hanging in the air, you’re not alone. Most likely, you’re in the majority. It’s hard not to stumble upon similarly crafted, cancerous click-batey headlines across the interweb.
People love to package their ascend-to-success stories as a series of steps that are easy to follow. One major problem is that they often assume too much about the reader. Sometimes, the only way you could follow the steps provided, and achieve what the author did, is to be their identical copy.
It’s cool to share experiences! We learn from each other’s experiences, and they help us grow, both individually and as a group. What’s not cool is to package your experiences as a factual, one-size-fits-all singular source of truth.
Anecdotes don’t qualify as scientific evidence. Be wary when incorporating someone else’s routine into your life. More often than not, you will have to iterate through multiple rounds of finely tuning the recipes you read to accomplish the task.
Heck, if I can be critical of everything I read, so can you!
For some time now, I have wanted to set up a blog using a static site generator. There was no real reason behind that wanting. It was just the plain old curiosity combined with the drive to learn new things.
I’m not sure when exactly the trend began, but I remember articles named “I switched my blog to [Hugo/Jekyll] ” started popping up across the interweb frequently some two years ago.
It wasn’t until I had to write a documentation page for one of my side projects that I started to think seriously about SSGs.
I ended up writing documentation manually in HTML at that time. I just wanted to push it out ASAP, and I rejected the thought of reading the documentation of any SSG, even for measly 10 minutes.
Even though I didn’t use SSG for that task, it was at that moment that I decided I will most definitely use a static site generator for my web properties that are existing purely for displaying static content. Hell, I’m a developer, no excuses not to.
Starting with WordPress
When I decided to write my first blog post last year in April, I wrote it in vim. It was sitting on my disk for two days because I had no idea what to use to publish it online.
SSGs were popular, but the decision fell on WordPress because I have installed it many, many times before. It was familiar, and I felt comfortable with it. I knew the plugin ecosystem, and I knew I could connect to the WP dashboard from anywhere and type out a post inside its WYSIWYG editor and publish it – without having to think about anything else.
I connected to the VPS I rent, installed PHP, MySQL, and Nginx. I extracted the WP zip and went through few screens of the installation procedure. After that, I took the freely available theme and pasted my blog post into the WP editor. That was all I had to do – 10 minutes from start to finish. Easy!
If I wasn’t obsessed with optimizing things that don’t matter much, and I didn’t consider it as a fun way to spend Saturday evenings, I would leave it at that. I didn’t because I am obsessed with things some would consider stupid – like optimizing a blog that holds a dozen blog posts.
Things that started to frustrate me
When I wrote the first blog post that got some attention, hundreds of people started commenting on it. There were some positive comments and some comments that were not so nice. I didn’t care about any of them but one. It was the comment that said my blog was slow.
I was thinking – here I am, a guy that talks about optimizing stuff all the time, and my website consisting only of text is slow AF. And it was. There was no excuse. I was making people download a megabyte of data only to display a few lousy paragraphs of text.
Just for the front page where the last ten blog posts were listed, your browser had to:
download 1.04 MB of data
make 38 requests
wait for 1.56 seconds
And that was after an optimization plugin for WordPress combined and minimized the assets and cached what it could. Awful! The only thing I could do that was worse would be not displaying the text to people that have Javascript disabled. I made sure that wasn’t the case. I don’t want to end up in hell.
Now, to be clear, this is not a WordPress problem. It was my problem. If I had built the theme from scratch, I would have more control. In that case, I could’ve been more careful about the assets I was linking.
I could’ve had a better caching mechanism and maybe a CDN in front. That would make the experience better for the reader. It would only mask the underlying problem, though. I’m serving only text – why the fuck do I need so many resources?
Hello Hugo
It boiled down to the decision between Hugo and Jekyll in the end. I forgot why I chose the former. Maybe it was someone’s tweet or a blog post I read.
Initially, I thought I’ll need to spend at least a day going through the documentation. I was mistaken. The documentation is well written, and almost everything has an example.
In the end, I didn’t even use any of the WordPress migration tools. I don’t have many posts (not yet!), so I decided to convert them manually to markdown files. Also, it gave me the chance to re-read the content I wrote and check if I can find any typos to fix.
If documentation is easy to follow, you may ask why the hell it took me over a month to finish the migration, because I’m posting this on Jun 27th and I started migrating the blog on May 17th.
It was mostly being occupied with other things. I planned to finish this in two months, putting in an hour or two per week into it. I’ve been investing more of my off time into writing – something I will do more of this year (and now I have a faster blog!).
In total, I spent between ten and twelve hours on migration. It was mostly me changing some CSS settings and reversing them. I don’t have an eye for design, and it’s always been hard for me.
I started with a theme I thought looks cool – Anatole, and then I added my custom styling on top of it. In the process, I played with the layouts and learned most of the insides of Hugo and its theming. It will come in handy in the future, I have no doubt about that.
Regarding the process of writing a post and publishing it on the blog, it’s as simple as it can be
Write a blog post in markdown
Run hugo to build it
SCP to the server
When I say simple, I’m saying it’s simple and easy for me – a person with a programming background that feels comfortable with markdown and command line.
I’m not trying to say that this is something that everyone should do. I believe that WordPress provides a great platform for aspiring bloggers that don’t want to or don’t know how to go through this process.
Just give me the stats
Here are the stats for the website after the migration. I can say it’s much better now. There is still room for improvement, of course, but I’ll refrain from going fully mad and trying to cut down more stuff. I’m happy with it for now.
To show you the front page of my blog, your browser now needs to:
Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Know that one? The former depicts the views of our pessimist and the latter of our optimist on the state of the glass which volume is 50% occupied by some hypothetical liquid.
How would our characters view the current state of the tech world?
I will name three facts about tech nowadays and try to imagine the responses of our three imaginary characters with their different attitudes.
Three facts that our characters will respond to are:
Jump to any topic that you find interesting, and if you wish, you can ignore the rest. They are completely separate.
Before we dive in, let’s meet our characters.
All three of them have a lot of things in common – they all work in tech, they are all the same age (enough to remember the pre-cloud, pre-covid, and pre-social media world) and they (luckily for our realist) live in a world where fish peacefully coexist with human beings.
1) Everything is in the cloud, renting is replacing ownership and most of the software exists as a service
Optimist:
That’s great! It saves me a lot of headaches. I remember the days when I had to transfer all of my data between devices with a USB stick. And then if you lose it, you have one problem more. Transition to the cloud is a godsend, especially because the apps various companies built to go with it work so seamlessly.
I don’t have to worry about syncing my data anymore. It’s done in the background, automagically. I lost several days of work at that time my hard drive died on me. Luckily, that can’t happen again.
All the data is now transferred constantly to a safe storage facility, where it has a redundant backup. It’s also all encrypted, safe, and I don’t have one worry in my mind about it.
This software as a service thing is also really convenient. I can sign up for something for as long as I want to and cancel it when I want to. Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?
Before this became a thing, I would have to save money to buy some software, and it was always an enormous investment for me. It didn’t matter if you use it or not – you paid big bucks for it and it’s sitting there. After some time, a new version of the thing you bought gets released, and you realize you need it because all the people you work with are switching to that version. Again, pay big bucks.
Nowadays, I rent the software, it’s automatically updated in the cloud so I’m always using the latest version, and I simply stop paying for it once I don’t need it anymore.
This cloud thing is awesome!
Pessimist:
Cloud is a synonym for mass surveillance. Hey George Orwell, your 1984 started with the coming of the magnificent cloud. All praise the cloud!
I can’t buy anything anymore that doesn’t want to connect to the freaking cloud. Some things will not even work if they can’t connect. That’s really great. I guess toasting a piece of bread requires an Internet connection and a user account nowadays. What progress we made!
I don’t buy all that convenience with the background sync. Apps are not that great and they certainly don’t work on all platforms. It’s like people changed their workflow to create a problem that the cloud solved. Who needs to transfer their files several times a day from one device to another. And how many devices does a person need?
Can you believe you can’t actually buy and own the software you want nowadays? Nope. They make you pay for it monthly, or yearly. Of course that the cancellations are sometimes impossible and you get auto charged a lot of times, even if you didn’t want to.
Most of the stuff you could do offline back in the day, you can’t do today. It’s all on the freaking web or connected to it. Some stuff that we had functional and good 20 years ago – now we have poor copies of it, but in the web browser.
Cloud, my disappointment is immeasurable.
Realist:
Moving to the cloud brought us a lot of things deemed unimaginable 15 years ago. Many of the services running in the cloud nowadays couldn’t exist without it – the way they are built and the purpose they are serving require a constant synchronization with an online source.
Services like online storage, online office suites, variety of productivity tools with collaboration features – they solved a real problem we previously had and made us better at our daily work.
While there’s a trend to turn everything into a service that is being rented, and sometimes it makes little sense, the benefits outweigh the annoyances the whole ‘moving to the cloud’ brought us. Just like with everything in life, it’s wise to have a backup plan. In the possibility you get locked out from a specific provider, you can still conduct your business.
With proper planning, proper privacy settings, and being cautious who you choose to rent the service from, you can benefit from a plethora of great online tools that will make your life easier.
2) COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the rise of remote work for most tech workers and it’s unclear how that’ll continue
Optimist:
Well, it was time for work from home to become a norm. The commute is killing me. I was thinking of getting an apartment close to work, but it’s really expensive. Showing up every day in the office takes two hours from my day. I could spend those two hours with my friends, doing yoga, relaxing, or just enjoying the coziness of my apartment.
And the food! I can cook my food and eat it fresh, not microwaved. I don’t have to go outside and wait in line or sit in a restaurant waiting for a meal. That’s even more time saved.
Open office bugged me. All the noise and chatter are a bit irritating, and I dislike wearing ANC headphones all day long. In my home, I’m the king of the castle and everything is just as I want it to be. Gosh, I hope this sticks!
Pessimist:
What a crock of shit that entire work from home is. I can’t wait to get back to the office. I miss my colleagues!
Do you know what you can’t do from your cozy home? You can’t overhear your colleagues discussing something interesting in the hallway. Sometimes that would spark an interesting conversation that would benefit all of you.
This work from home really interferes with my work/life separation. Before I worked from home only, I would rarely open my work laptop at home.
It’s just not the same conversing over the screen. And the mentoring… A junior developer just started her job, and trying to get her up to speed this way is awful. It would be so much easier and natural to do it in person.
Pair programming? Did you try to do it online? It sucks!
Conversations with my colleagues are colder, and I feel disconnected from them. Even being seen by others in the open space made me more productive. I wasn’t distracted that much.
And the food! Our cafeteria at work was the best! Fresh, free, as much as you want. I saved so much money on groceries when I was working from the office. Good times!
Realist:
Remote work and remote workers will benefit long-term from the situation that got us all locked up in the last year. A lot of managers and executives were prohibiting people to work from home under the pretenses that the productivity will suffer. We have since learned that it’s the total opposite.
While we can do most of the things from home as we can from the office, I believe there are some things that are easier done face to face – in person.
Many people work remotely only, and that’s fine. If the entire company works remotely only, that’s even better. Because they built their culture around that way of work, and everyone works under the same conditions.
Where WFH and office workers are mixed, office workers will always have some advantage. Bonding, communicating, catching up with someone in the hallway – I believe those things are not easily replaceable with the existing online alternatives.
While I stand by the belief that a sensible mixture of remote and office work is optimal for the majority, I think the changes regarding remote work in the past year were a net positive for everyone involved. We made a lot of progress regarding tools, software, and policies for those working from their homes. It both benefits employees and employers.
I hope we will be able to accommodate both groups – those who wish to work from home only and those that prefer to work from the office. This sticky situation we found ourselves in just sped up the inevitable.
3) Social networks are becoming a way of life, most of the interactions are online, and attention span is getting shorter
Optimist:
Wow! I’m in contact with so many people that I usually wouldn’t be. There’s just no time. With social networks, I can see what Jerry is doing and where Elaine went on vacation – with a measly click of a mouse.
Kramer is still being silly. I love the stuff he shares. It always makes me laugh. Back in the day, I would only interact with my coworkers and a handful of close friends that I sometimes wouldn’t meet for weeks because of our busy schedules.
Thanks to social networks, I know what’s everyone up to and I don’t even have to pick up the phone all the time to check upon them.
Event scheduling is so awesome, our dinner hangouts are so much easier to plan. No more playing the telephone game. And it’s all there. Not just the dinner hangouts. I can see all the things happening around me – from the local meetups to concerts.
I can also get the news I’m interested in right there on my feed. Tailored to me, and easily accessible. I like the format too. No boring long-form articles – everything is so snappy, and I catch up on so much!
Pessimist:
Everyone wants to be my friend online. It lost its original meaning. I don’t care for Bob; we didn’t speak for 15 years since we finished high school. There’s a good reason for that. Bob’s an asshole.
A friend just told me the other day he found out his daughter is cyberbullying some poor kid at her school. He didn’t even know she was part of so many groups online. It’s tough to keep track of that and almost impossible to keep under control.
I can’t even have a decent dinner with my friends anymore. At least one person is checking their phone to see what their network is doing. They are eating dinner in front of you, you doofus!!!
FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. That’s now a common theme. God forbid you to miss that the cafe in your neighborhood is using fancy new chair cushions.
That’s not even the worst thing. It’s the constant seek of others’ approval. Constant comparison with others. We’re not all built the same, and we’re not all equally strong – both physically and mentally. Some people develop a problem. They link their self-worth to their looks and their possessions.
It’s not entirely the fault of social networks, but the business model, that many of the social networks adhere to, promotes that kind of behavior. People are getting hurt in unprecedented numbers at an unprecedented speed.
Realist:
Social networks solved the problem of connecting and conversing with more people than we would be able to within the constraints of our physical world. We could connect with people online before the rise of social networks, but they made it easy. So easy that even the most technically challenged people can be part of them. Everyone can join a discussion and everyone can be part of the group that’ll accept them as a member.
Keeping your family and friends updated on your or your child’s life is something that social networks made possible in a no-effort manner. Features that social networks offer can improve your social life, they don’t have to replace it.
Being a responsible person, and teaching younger generations to be as responsible is the most important thing to enjoy all the benefits of social networks without the downsides mentioned by the pessimist Richard.
Event management and social organization tools made some great happenings around people visible, something that was harder to do previously.
If one considers social networks as an extension of their social life, and not the replacement, joining one can be a substantial addition to one’s life. It’s easy to get fooled by the overwhelming ways social networks share your data, but if you treat it and behave like you would in real life – you’ll probably be safe.
People wrote that certain cultures are more direct than others, mentioning Dutch as an example of directness. Some said that being direct and unfiltered is a way to go, while others showed more appreciation for the somewhat filtered and more nuanced type of critique.
When it comes to receiving critique, I would choose directness and rawness all day long. That doesn’t mean I want to deal with assholes and sadists though.
If you comment on something I’ve done with “This is complete shit!”, without backing that up with at least one “why”, I will label you as an asshole, but…
If you comment on something I’ve done with “This is complete shit because x/y/z!”, I will thank you for your feedback. Hell, if that “x/y/z” is detailed and you put some thought into it, I’ll buy you a beer!
I’m not saying you should start your critiques with words like “This is complete shit”, and I think that you should always be polite and considerate towards people. Not just while giving them a critique, but always.
What I’m saying is that when you work with me specifically, you can be brutally direct and honest. You can even use adjectives that society deems unacceptable. You don’t have to sugarcoat it, and you don’t need to start with something positive pulled out of thin air only to ease me into the shit part. Just tell me what exactly is the part that’s shit and why.
PS. I wrote this so I can share it with all the people I’ll be working with in the future.
Bombarded with an endless stream of content to consume, the majority often skips longer publications.
Often, the reason won’t be because of the contents, but because of the knee-jerk reaction to the longer blocks of text. Conversely, there’s a group that doesn’t care for stripped-down versions of everything they read. They want the details, the back story – the whole nine yards.
Can we appeal to both groups? I have an idea that we could apply to digital content. It’s something that’s been on my mind for some time now.
It doesn’t use AI, machine learning, or [insert any buzzword here]. The software part is some Javascript code that will enable you to present your writing in different forms. All the work is on you, figuring out how to structure the content to fit this form.
Every concept worth anything should have a name, so I call mine – TooLooDR (I love saying too-loo out loud).
TooLooDR explained in 3 sentences
TooLooDR is a writing and reading concept that aims to present one article in several forms and lengths by separating the content into multiple levels of detail.
Its structure guides the author to think in terms of complexity, lengthiness, and targeted audience for each level they create.
The goal of TooLooDR is to offer brevity for those who are in a hurry, but also provide more detail on demand for those who want more.
Before going any further, let me show you what a TooLooDR article looks like. An example is worth a thousand words (says he unironically, knowing it will probably sound stupid in this context).
Example of a TooLooDR article
Note: The content of the example article is irrelevant. I just needed something as an example, so I took the previous blog post I wrote. Keep in mind that I didn’t change the text. I wanted to prove that we can apply this concept even to the text that wasn’t written with it in mind (let’s call that kind of text – TooLooDR non-friendly text).
Clicking on GIF will open a new tab with the fully functional demo.
What’s going on here?
I will try to explain how I envision each TooLooDR level.
I’m mentioning things like “flow” and “artistic style” below, and I know that may sound like I’m some pompous, deluded guy that thinks he knows how to write. I don’t. It’s how I envision someone that actually can write using TooLooDR.
Also, If you read this part, and go back to check the demo article, you can see that the example article and my idea of the perfect TooLooDR article differ. Again, I’m just a poor developer dude that blogs occasionally.
Level 1 (tldr1)
This level should contain the bare-bones, stripped-down version of the article. Think of it as a modern equivalent of telegram-style writing. Don’t think about the flow and don’t think about the artistic quality of this part. It can be ugly (well, it would be better if it’s not) if you can’t help it. The only purpose of this level is to send your message across – loud and clear!
This should get the attention of the “tl;dr” sayers, denying them the pleasure to reply with that same “tl;dr” in your comments.
Depending on the length of the entire article, this level should contain approximately 15 to 25 percent of the whole TooLooDR article.
Level 2 (tldr2)
This is the golden middle. It expands the dry and lifeless sentences of the previous level to a richer form, adding adjectives and adverbs. It also adds additional information to back up the claims made at the level below.
This is where you should make sure that your article has a certain flow to it. Make it pretty and make it engaging. This is actually what an entire non-TooLooDR article should look like.
Depending on the length of the entire article, this level (which means tldr1 + tldr2) should make up approximately 45 to 60 percent of the whole TooLooDR article.
Level 3 (tldr3)
Level 3 is your all-you-can-eat buffet of detail. This level is for those invested in the topic. It’s intended to display background information, low-level detail, everything that you as an author wanted to put in your article, but thought it would be too much.
You can go nuts here, really. Of course, you don’t want to write gibberish that has nothing to do with the rest of the article.
What’s wrong with the abstract?
You could say that the solution to this problem is the standard abstract you can see used in most of the publications.
There is nothing wrong with having an abstract. Heck, you can even write one before your TooLooDR article. I think they serve a different purpose.
The principal goal of this concept I’m writing about is making your content progressive. Empowering you to craft your content in a way where levels are intertwined and their subtraction or addition provokes interest from your readers.
Conclusion
It takes time to write something engaging, and it takes even more time having to think about the different forms in which people can consume the content you write.
The question is – is it worth it?
I need to write several articles using this concept to test exactly how much more time it takes me to do so following the TooLooDR concept.
I believe it won’t make much of a difference for me, because I already change each sentence I write multiple times before hitting that “publish button”.
Just like I stated at the beginning of this post that there are different types of people when it comes to reading, there are probably even more different types of people when it comes to writing.
