With a little help from my friends

This website has existed in various forms for over 25 years. Earlier this week, with the help of Claude, I ported it from Jekyll on Heroku, to Hugo on GitHub Pages, and eventually to a simple container on Fly.io (hi Kurt!). The last time I overhauled it was 2014, from a lodge in New Zealand.

With Claude, I explored a few dozen decision trees, tradeoffs on hosting, exploring costs and capabilities. Ultimately, the technology choices were…boring. Hugo because I’m familiar with (and a contributor to) Go. Inline tests written in Go, auto-deploy from GitHub Actions, and reasonable dependency updates powered by Dependabot.

The whole thing is more hands-off, and I suspect subject to less bit-rot than previous iterations. Things this website once depended on, but I no longer have to worry about:

  1. Running on a server in my bedroom
  2. Maintaining a bespoke CRM
  3. Linux kernel updates
  4. Purchasing and installing TLS certificates (thanks LetsEncrypt!)
  5. Perl version and dependency drift
  6. Ruby version and dependency drift
  7. Writing all the code by hand

The joy of writing code with AI feels like the joy of waiting for C to compile in the 90s. Weird, I know. But magic.