Just Do the "Simple Thing" for Now
At the start of 2025, I found myself in an unusual place. I had just left my job, and suddenly, I had all this time to dive deep into the things I’d always been curious about. For me, that meant going further into the mathematics behind artificial intelligence and exploring the internals of operating systems.
It was fascinating. I spent weeks reading Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces and really getting lost in the details. The book, despite its title, is anything but “easy” at first glance. Concepts like process scheduling, memory management, and file systems felt complex when I was in the middle of studying them. But once I put in the effort, the fundamentals started to click together, and I realized they weren’t really complicated at all. They were just simple concepts, strung together in intricate ways, creating the illusion of complexity.
Things often feel complex until you break them down.
Around the same time, I decided to start my own blog. Instead of picking the easiest way to publish my writing, I gravitated toward the not-so-simple path. I bought a server on DigitalOcean, installed Ubuntu 24, set up all the packages I needed, configured systemctl services to pull from my Git branch, and even wrote a cron job to auto-renew my SSL certificates.
Here’s how a typical deploy looked for me:
- SSH into my server.
- Pull the latest changes from Git.
- Run my build process.
- Restart the service with
systemctl restart.
It worked, and I’d done this multiple times for many other hobby projects of mine. Every time I wanted to push a new blog post, I had to go through this little ritual. What should have been as simple as writing and publishing turned into a maintenance task. Of course I could have just as easily come up with a simple easy to use bash script that I automated all of this.
For something as small as a personal blog, this was overkill. Unsurprisingly, the site went down after a few months, and I let it fade away.
Recently, I decided to revisit the idea of blogging. But this time, I asked myself: why am I making this so hard?
I didn’t want the friction of SSH-ing into a server every time. I didn’t want to babysit deploys or worry about uptime. I just wanted to write.
I decided to use Cloudflare Pages. It had everything I was looking for:
- Connect my GitHub repository.
- Add a simple build command.
- Push my changes.
That’s it. Every commit automatically deploys my blog, for free. No servers to manage, no SSL headaches, no manual deployments. And since I already use Cloudflare for DNS, it even less effort to set things up.
Looking back, I think I chose the path of doing things manually before because there’s a certain satisfaction in doing everything by hand. It makes you feel like you’re doing something meaningful. And sure, if I wanted to, I could invest the time and energy to do it all manually again. But the question I keep circling back to is: is it worth it?
For a personal blog, the answer is no. It’s far better to conserve that energy for things that really matter; whether that’s writing, learning, or solving bigger problems.
Not everything needs to be built the “hard way.” Sometimes, the best thing you can do is pick the simple option, avoid the friction, and move on.
I’m realizing more and more that keeping workflows dead simple makes it easier to stay consistent, and it frees up energy for the things that actually need it.