Engineering the Craft
Ten years ago I started this site with my very first entry, "To blog or not to blog". Back then, Finally a homepage seemed the right name, since it took me a while to get my personal blog up.
A brief history
I never wanted to use any platform, like WordPress or - back then - Blogger. I wanted text files that are transformed to HTML. Being mostly a system developer, with not much idea of websites, that was quite an entry barrier. Don’t forget, AI as fast startup help was not even on the horizon back then 😉. And I did not want to care too much about release workflows and create my own set of tooling.
That all changed with Bitbucket Pages, where I had the initial version of this blog. Suddenly, my release flow was: generate the page, commit, and push. Done. That, and the Asciidoctor-based static site generator, were the enablers who brought me onto the net. I felt I came in super late, so I chose the name: Finally a homepage.
Changes over time
Since then the page has made a few transitions.
The original static generator became unmaintained, and I updated to Nanoc. I changed the domain from Bitbucket to GitLab, which also changed the URLs and the comment system I used back then. I also did not want to lose the Google ranking of my BitBake guide, so that migration was not as easy as it seemed. At least, to me. The change happened halfway through the blog’s life, in 2020, as described in Moving this site to a new location.
Meanwhile I moved to my own domain, a4z.noexcept.dev, and also replaced the comment system for reasons described in New blog domain and comment section. I think it’s cool to have a C++ keyword in the domain.🤓
Finally a new name
In my last post, the SwedenCpp 2025 post I mentioned that we are entering the 10th anniversary year. That milestone also reminded me of the age of this blog, and so it felt like the right moment to revisit the old title. "Finally a homepage" no longer describes what this place has become. I iterated over names and stuck with: Engineering the Craft, since it feels like this is what I do most in my work as a developer.
So I renamed the site to Engineering the Craft. It is still my personal blog, but it also reflects the steady, deliberate work of building, learning, and hopefully also improving over time.
Disclaimer
This post was written by a human. AI has only been used for spell-checking.