Rix1-builds is dead, long live Lume

TL;DR: I just ported my site from Next.js/ContentLayer setup to Lume.

I guess it’s a running joke that developers have to rebuild their site every two years, but right now I was tired of running into bugs and quirks with ContentLayer. In addition, using Next.js for something as simple as a site with largely static content felt unnecessary. The popular JS-frameworks are great for building complex user interfaces that depend on a lot of local state or presenting complex remote state. A personal blog has neither.

In a former post I documented my Turborepo setup for sharing code, config setup across different projects. After two years, this haven’t really reaped the benefits I was hoping for. In some cases it even felt limiting: My focus very quickly went from “let’s play around with technology to scratch an itch” to “first, I just have to do some upgrades and/or refactor because what I’m trying to do doesn’t fit into my existing monorepo structure”. This is yak shaving at its “finest”, considering I’m only doing this for me 🤦‍♂️

For creative work to flourish, you have to remove all unnecessary distractions. A new idea is like a butterfly — one sudden move (or distraction) and it’s gone. Starting my favorite pastime with what is essentially grunt work/maintenance is downright stupid. Ideas and momentum get lost in the process of doing busywork for the sake of it.

So I’m back to having this site being it’s own repository, and the page is now built by Lume, a pretty neat static site generator. Where Jekyll feels like an old relic, Lume meets me where I am today.