Joao Alves
Engineering Manager at IndeedFlex
From Medium to my blog - the why
Hi everyone 👋 in this article I’m going to share why I decided to create a new personal website and in the process move all my Medium content here as well.
Let’s just be clear, it was not about Medium’s business model. While I think a lot of people (me included) can agree that as a platform, it might not be going in a great direction, it is not the reason I’m moving away from it.
I just started a new job and had a 2 week period between where I had to find something interesting to do 😁, and yeah that was honestly the main reason. I spent some time playing with Flutter but then had a couple of colleagues (kudos to Darren Atherton and Filipe Mendes) talking to me about Hugo and Jekyll, and that was it.
I really enjoyed how both tecnhologies integrate so well with GitHub or GitLab pages and how easy it was to set up a simple website that I decided to spend more time playing with it. From there to deciding that actually building a proper personal website including a blog was not a long way, especially after seeing how many almost-ready templates for it there is. More on this in the second article in the series.
Just to conclude the Medium subject, I just want to say how grateful I am for its existence and how it allowed me to reach to so many people in such an easy way. I think the low entry barrier is still the best thing they have and it’s definitely a massive asset for someone without the knowledge or the time to spend building their own thing.
Plus, some of my content written as part of my employees blogs will still live there and I hope it can reach as many people as possible. My current employee also has their Engineering Blog on Medium, so I’m sure I’ll have more content there at some point.
On the audience subject, and other than the platform itself, the ProAndroidDev publication, by accepting and publishing my articles allowed me to reach an audience of thousands instantly, I can not deny how cool it is to have your stuff read by so many people, so massive kudos to them as well.
But as I said, after spending some time building this website, it made sense to move all my content here and have full control over it. I know I’ll probably loose some of my audience but it was a fun project to do and something I want to maintain and if possible add a few more things as well. I’m sure I’ll have different kinds of fun building up and maintaining my own thing, I’ll share some of the initial fun on the following articles 🙂.
Important notes
As mentioned before, content published inside employees blogs is staying on Medium. All of the other content, regardless of being in a publication now, is moving here (one of my series still in the process but will happen soon).
Other than some required tweaks and clean-ups explained better on a future article, I didn’t update neither content or code and projects in any way, as that would be on its own a massive project. Going through that process, unfortunately, it’s not my priority right now so please look at the dates of the articles and always check for the latest dependencies and instructions when that makes sense.
For discoverability and not to loose as many followers, I’ll keep all the articles live on Medium under my profile but update the content to link into their counterpart on this website. For the articles under my employees publications, the opposite happens, the articles on this website link to the original post.