Boring is good

I just switched my blog engine again. I was previously using Hugo, which is a static site engine written in Go. It's an interesting project and there's a lot to like about it. It's fast, being written in Go means that precompiled binaries are available for any modern system, and did I mention it was fast?

If I'm being honest with myself, however, I didn't pick it for either of those reasons. I picked it because it was interesting and new. But those same attributes have caused me to have to do a lot of extra work, including migrating a theme, fixing some issues with the 404.html logic, and hand-crafting an individual-post layout system. None of that work was particularly challenging, though the layout system wasn't exactly fun. But - at least apart from the 404.html issue which may help some other users - it was very much a waste of time.

If all I needed was a blog, I could have just used Jekyll. But I didn't, because both Jekyll and Ruby are boring. They're not fun or sexy or interesting, they're just there. Chugging along, doing what they're supposed to, not really drawing a lot of attention to themselves.

But you know what? That's ok. I don't have to fight Jekyll to get it to generate my blog. I don't have to create a custom publish / deploy workflow to get it to work correctly within GitHub pages. I don't have to come up with fancy new solutions to boring, old, solved problems.

It's stable, it's proven, and it gets out of my way. I can focus on doing and expect my tools to Just Work™ without much input from me. That's the reason I use vim. That's the reason I use Mac OS X. And now, that's the reason I use Jekyll. They're boring, and they leave me to focus on solving real problems instead of reorganizing index cards as productivity porn.