New Blog, Hello Gatsby!

Hello blog!

The last entry I wrote in this blog was just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit us all. Whew, it seems like it was ages ago.

A lot of things changes since then. This blog, for example.

Instead of hosting it in WordPress and MySQL running in Azure, it's now running as a static page in Azure, generated with the Gatsby static site framework.

It took me about two months to learn the basics of Gatsby, to export all the posts from the old blog, to carefully fix the non-compatible tags in the exported Markdown files and to tweak the Gatsby blog starter to something more to my liking.

In the process, I've learned a lot, of course.

Also, I changed jobs. Again. I work now for Vistaprint, an e-commerce for anything that you might want to print.

Not only that. I changed the entire technology stack. Instead of SharePoint, Office 365, Azure and .NET I now work with AWS, NodeJS and Serverless.

It took me almost a year to feel competent and confident with the new tools and solutions. It took me even more to fully embrace my first workplace without clients, where the users of my code are colleagues and where the impact is measured in months and years, not in the deadlines.

I am not a Microsoft MVP anymore. It has been nine years and a journey to remember. Strangely enough, I don't miss it as much as I thought I would. (I still miss the complimentary Azure subscription that came with it). I miss the people I met as an MVP, though.

I can't promise to write regularly on the blog, but I'll try. It is the next thing to journalling.