So ya, I’m actually using WordPress…
I’ll admit that until my life as a developer, I didn’t feel that compelled to put myself out there in print. But I so appreciated the many software development and engineering blogs that helped me with my work, I thought it was time that I did some contributing to the blogosphere.
The fact is though, in mid-2020, with the rise of serverless and Jamstack, it just isn’t fashionable to use WordPress if you’re a developer. So, I immediately started down the road of Gatsby, Hugo, Next.js and the like.
What I quickly discovered, after thumbing through docs, looking at templates and sample sites, and doing some video tutorials, was that this was all a lot more hassle than it’s worth.
Maybe if I were very focused on SEO for this site (I am not) I would have dug deeper to climb the learning curve and hang with the cool kids. Instead, I found myself eventually coming back to the time-tested favorite, WordPress, and wondering – are there devs out there using it? Can I generate a static site with it? Do I really even need/want a static site?
I have found some compatriots, like Syed Balkhi from WPBeginner.com who, admittedly went to a great deal of work to make a WordPress site outperform static sites.
So, I am content for now, but do have an itch to develop some further stats on my own site here once I get some further content created and see where optimizations are needed to support rapid page load times and other desirable measures.