Nothing and everything. I simply haven’t written any blog posts since the end of last year.

I managed to basically confirm my own theory—developers only write blog posts if they are looking for work and can literally only keep with the habit for a few weeks.

Just to be clear, I’m not looking for work, but I’m also tired of apologizing for the lack of content.

January to July seemed like a blur. On the work front, it was hard but very exciting. My main client, Acenta, underwent a look and feel rebrand, launched our first major software-based product—Quick Connect—and extensively changed most of our internal processes.

It’s the sort of thing you can be super happy you’re a part of, but simultaneously wish you could just chuck into the Done column so that you can marvel at the sunset for a hot minute.

On the personal front, it was mostly rough seas. I went to three funerals of family members and friends I hoped would never happen, or at least not for a few decades.

On top of it—or perhaps as a consequence—my schedule went completely haywire. I worked on client projects, rushed home to pick up my son for his training sessions, and went home.

Other than the absolute necessities, I dropped off the face of the Earth. I stopped going to the gym, and in general, just tried my hardest to hold my head above the rising water level.

I had plenty of plans this year that got delayed. In the end, I decided family life should take priority. I decided it was high time and took a month off.

Are you back, though?

A week ago, I would have said I wasn’t sure.

Today, I am. I can’t pinpoint what changed, but something did: I decided it was time to give it a big-ass push.

Here’s the reality: I’m 35.

I don’t see myself reinventing myself over the age of 40.

It’s time to pick a lane and stick with it, get good at things that matter to me, or go out in a blaze of glory while trying my absolute hardest to get to where I want to go.

A single grain of rice can tip the scales…

(Yup, that was Mulan.)

Sorry for the detour, where were we?

In 2019, I bought a domain, 50dollarstartup.co. It was the classic spur-of-the-moment domain purchase you would do on the eve of December 24th.

Which I did. Guilty.

As usual, I was very enthusiastic. I wanted to turn it into a content site, where I would build in public, invest my time and up to a maximum of $600 within a year in pursuit of a goal, just to see how far a little financial gamble and some effort can take it.

My main motivation was not to increase my earnings. I wanted to show that even people who are not peak performers in their individual branch can help other people who are still scared to put themselves and their work out there.

Yet,… it’s still sitting there empty. Like a vacant digital lot in a shady digital neighborhood. Yikes.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll start developing 50dollarstartup.co into the fully featured site it was meant to be. Then I’ll clean up my act and start delivering. The first “$50 Startup” is already in the works.

During the course of it all, I will try my best to explain my motivations and goals for individual ideas while capturing content so that it becomes a puzzle piece for the next thing, and the next and hopefully a few after that.

If you got this far, thank you. This simple thing means more to me than you know.

Now it’s time for me to give something back.

Since launching this blog 8 days ago, I’ve been ashamed to put it out there. Sure, I added it to my LinkedIn page and sent it off to a few friends, but I was totally and utterly terrified to put it out “for real.”

The idea of this website started 5 years ago. First, it was supposed to be a Medium publication. No hosting, no problem. I even had a small circle of people interested in what I had to say due to my previous position at Hiveterminal.

Then, I decided I cared deeply about owning my own content and might as well make it a mini personal website. I wrote the first version in Jigsaw. It was nice, close to Laravel, but not quite there.

I got tired of jumping the not-quite hoop, so I shifted to a pure Laravel project, which I thought might be better and more future-proof. What if I want to turn it into a full learning management system one day? Or allow people to guest post? Or use it as an opportunity to create my own CMS and stop shipping WordPress sites once and for all…

A few years later, I migrated it (again) over to Astro. No server to babysit and pay for. Pretty close to straight HTML. I was about 95% in when I realized that I wanted to modify some of the out-of-the-box behavior with how I wanted it to work and I know close to zero JavaScript. Great.

What you’re reading right now is v4. It’s in SvelteKit, since I decided that I should probably consolidate all of my websites to a single platform instead of a never-ending merry-go-round of the new & shiny framework. Also, it gave me a chance to learn the basics of SvelteKit, so what the heck…

What is worse is that across all the iterations, the functionality is mostly the same and the look pretty much hasn’t changed. Sure, some tech made some parts easier and others close to impossible. Most of the time I was hitting the same roadblocks over and over, dreaming of the ideal combination of UX (user experience), DX (developer experience), and AX (authoring experience).

Four years went by and I wrote close to zero non-work-related content. Yikes.

Here’s the Hard Truth…

As developers, our job is not (only) to write code. We spend most of our professional lives translating business requirements to code, tools, and products. Creating abstractions. Turning concepts into models, migrations, controllers, and endpoints. We turn ideas into flowcharts and prototypes and make beautiful products, (ideally) on time and on budget.

We get to play with all sorts of tech. From basic to advanced. From great to the one that makes you cringe. And since in our thirst for knowledge we mostly get sucked into our respective tech rabbit hole of the internet, we get to see plenty of websites. Pretty websites, with animations, articles getting read automagically by AI voices… you get the gist.

This is why it is an absolute nightmare to try to design and publish your own personal site. The voice in your head tells you it is not polished enough. Or wide enough. Or colorful. Or full of content.

You start comparing yourself to all sorts of people, who started publishing years (or in some cases decades) before you did. They’re not necessarily better than you, just way further along.

You get weird ideas flashing through your head. You start considering your website as sort of step one to your forever internet tombstone, that will live forever and be visited by internet tourists for years, so it can’t just be bad, right?

It should have more reference projects and client testimonials. You tell yourself your front-end skills are inadequate. That you should hire someone to code it up for you, or at least review it. That you need to get a proper photo taken and use one of the technologies from the razor’s edge to build it. Maybe it should be serverless? Maybe it should use GraphQL to pass your data around?

I’m not describing a fictional voice. This voice was in my head the whole time when building gal.jakic.dev, where this article will reside. Probably still is…

This voice is not real. This voice is the reason that I didn’t have a personal web page, even after 15 years of working in the web and tech space. This voice is just imposter syndrome talking. Just ship the f*cking thing already…

So, What Will You Use?

So, I built myself an MVB – a minimum viable blog. It is a statically generated site, with Tailwind CSS and MDSveX, hosted on Cloudflare. It has a Home page. It has a Blog page. It has an About page. I designed and built it myself and it is good enough.

The UX is okayish. DX and AX is a can I kicked as far down the road as I could. Currently, there are manual steps everywhere, there’s unnecessary duplication all over the place, and multiple files need to be changed for a blog post to be published. Spotted a few new ones since I started writing this blog post to be honest…

But I’ve decided all these nice to haves will just have to wait for another day. At work, minor issues like these would never delay a launch on my watch. Ever. So why whould they do so here?!

There is this thing called WordPress you could use…

Yes and no. It’s not that the features of MVB (Minimum Viable Blog) are “too advanced for WordPress to handle.” When it comes down to functionality, this website is straight up basic. Also, WordPress – love it or hate it – probably still owns the rest of the web in how quickly you can turn an idea from draft to launch.

Yet, inevitably, I get to compare most development experience (or DX) to the very high bar Laravel has set. And I find that every time I type laravel new, it’s a magical feeling.

I don’t get that with WordPress.

And - fingers crossed - maybe this is step one in a very long journey and I don’t want to use a platform I’m not very fond of to begin with. We all need more magic in our lives.

What’s next?

There are a million things I wish were on it and are not yet there. But as long as I keep writing, they will pop up eventually.

If you got this far, thank you.

P.S.

Check $this->page if you’re interested in learning more about the technology used to power this website or better yet, contribute your own.

We own a car and just a while ago my wife paid off her mortgage for the 52 square meter flat we live in. We are lucky to live in a quiet part of town, in a country  –  which you should visit, should you ever get the chance  –  where you don’t have to worry about crime rates, or healthcare bills, or being able to send your children to college. Incidentally, the same country that gave the World Luka Dončić. (Slovenia. And you are welcome.)

In 2002 I suffered a spinal stroke and have a wheelchair to prove it. It allowed me to do unimaginable things: spend the following 10 years of my life focused on Para-Alpine Ski Racing, being part of Slovene Para-Alpine Ski Team, and representing my country in 3 Paralympic Winter Games: 2006 Torino, 2010 Vancouver, and 2014 Sochi  –  if you are a nerd for details, such as me.

During that time I was also exposed to some other amazing opportunities: becoming the 1st skier with a disability to ski down the 2nd largest ski jumping hill in the world in a straight line. Crossing Slovenia on a handbike in 25 hours. Being a TEDx speaker. Being named Friend of Wings For Life Foundation (along with many exceptional athletes, among them Felix Baumgartner, the man who  –  literally  –  jumped from the edge of Space). Working as a motivational speaker for established brands in Slovenia and Europe, trying to inspire the up-and-coming developers on meetups (and perhaps soon, conferences). Professionally working with and for many talented developers, designers, and business owners.

But it’s the other side of the coin that sent me on a journey. If life  –  or more specifically, my own spinal stroke and two of my wife’s breast cancer diagnosis  –  has taught me anything, it is that you should take nothing for granted.

I am by no account perfect. I’m at my best in challenging situations, or as I like to put it, long-distance suffering. I’m also my own worst enemy when the landscape is perfect. I tend to overthink, over-engineer, and subsequently discard ideas before even giving them a chance to succeed. I still fear front-end code and have a real problem, when trying to write on the first page of a blank notebook someone bought for me.

I hope to get exactly 3 things out of this:

• talk about lessons learned in startup land
• give you a behind-the-scenes zero-bull$h!t of some of the stuff we get to do there
• (still don’t know and that’s OK.)

Follow along if this sounds like something you would be interested in.