My experience with using headless CMS: gatsby/netlify/strapi && publishing on my own domain: reasons

Welcome to the rocket ship 🚀

Okay so technically this is the first blog that I will be publishing on my own domain(not that it will change how I write) and I am kind of happy to write here instead of platforms where I have previously written (medium and hashnode sobbing while I am writing this)

For those that are coming this way for the first time, I am just another curious guy trying to merge technology and fiction through my writing along with my magic (development 😉) hold your seats tight, this ride is not going to satisfy your confirmation bias.

Now let's not waste any more time making this more dramatic then it already is and let's dive straight to the topic.

Headless CMS Abstractions: my 2 cents:

I created this blog with gatsby.js and now writing this blog with the help of netlify headless CMS along with these, I have tried strapi which is a headless CMS especially for backend applications, NODE and Express.js in my particular case and my experience was actually pretty good.

I am more biased towards building on the frontend side in general and for people who find creating servers utterly complex and difficult it is a good alternative instead of writing the database schemas themselves.

Using these services is in a sense very much similar to building landing pages and MVPs with no-code tools while some people may argue against it, I find it absolutely okay to use no-code tools if it automates the menial tasks such as building landing pages and helps in coming up with MVPs faster, now some of you may attack me for saying that building landing pages is a menial task, so let me project what I think about it.

I am personally more interested in building the main web application and I want the process of building and shipping to be as fast and effective, so that it becomes easier to iterate on feedbacks but hey you do you 😉 and more importantly this blog is not about that so let's not get distracted from the main topic in hand.

Using netlify CMS and strapi for building applications made me realize that we have two options to choose from when we are building something

• Reinventing the wheel from scratch (Going from 0 -1)
• Building on top of the wheel (Going from 1-10)

and it very much depends on the use-case and personal preferences of the builders. I personally belong to the second type, while some solutions can be fundamentally generated from scratch and you should at times to gain a deeper understanding of the problem statement at hand but:

You don't have to understand everything.

Technology in general progresses by starting from where other's left that's how we go from 1-10, a lot of the things that we are surrounded by today wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't built on top of another technology, technological progress is always a result of collective contribution rather than infinite individual solutions to the same problem and you will always find pathways and approaches that will lead you to a different process maybe with an improved outcome of what you set out to achieve but I am of the belief that efficiency when not needed is a dead weight, we are builders and our job is to build an effective product it doesn't matter what abstractions you built on top of as long as the end outcome it effective enough for people to act upon.

A good engineer should always know which tool to use in his toolbelt, using the tools with the most utility might be efficient but will it actually be effective? most important thing will it actually save time!

As engineers our task is to build stuff that serves as wheels for technological progress and we should focus only on achieving our task effectively for people to rely upon.

Here I am not inferring that going from 0-1 is not important, it is in some cases, when solutions are old enough and are not able to keep up with the current architecture at place but analyzing which route to take will always be our decision and it will only come through building and progressively iterating and that involves speed and time.

We cannot do everything.

Shifting To My Own Domain: reasons

I wrote my first blog two years ago during the lockdown and have been expressing my fair bit since then, over distributed platforms such as medium, hashnode, substack and twitter, there are many reasons for me to shift my publishing's to my own domain, the most important one of them being, keeping all of them in one place irrespective of the category, hashnode is good for technical blogs and I have received some very good feedbacks from it,

but I want my works and thoughts to be homed at my own property, writing here gives me a sense of freedom, here are no algorithms and topic tags to help this article get better reach, when people visit my site I want them to wander my personal library of thoughts, my interconnected web of ideas and executions and for that writing here makes perfect sense to me

When I become more regular at projecting my thoughts about tech and fiction, I want to start my abandoned newsletter once again, and this is the perfect place for that.

One of the most authentic thinkers that I have had the chance to read have their own library of thoughts, inspired by them I also see myself reaching there someday, Seth Godin and Paul Graham have had a huge contribution towards pushing me to projecting my thoughts and I want to write as effortlessly as them.

There is a limit to the level of customization I can achieve with platforms like hashnode and medium and I will never be able to give my personal touch the way I want to in those platforms, I don't care about reach that much, I believe that thoughts which resonate find themselves easily through words and ideas. Lastly the major reason for me shifting here is to create a fictional reality through my words, growing up, fiction has impacted a lot on the way I perceive things and I am extremely curious about technology intersecting with fiction, after all isn't it the purpose of technology to transform our imaginations into iterable realities that makes our lives easier?

I don't know whether writing in personal domain is better compared to writing in platforms or not, it's just my personal preference, what matters at the end is the transfer of thoughts and ideas so that we can collectively act upon them.

Concluding

Thank you for still being here, this is all I have to say about using headless CMS services and blogging do let me know if your thoughts are not in alignment with me, I'd really appreciate that :)