##I've Moved

I had been running blogs at excel2rlang.com and snitch0.github.io. This time I decided to discontinue those and consolidate everything into this single blog.

##Why I Moved My Blog

Simply put, my motivation for writing a blog changed significantly.

My motivation for starting excel2rlang.com was to earn some pocket money. I was bored during COVID and thought about starting a side hustle, so I chose tech blogging. Thankfully, I got decent traffic and received some advertising revenue. However, the problems were that I wasn't satisfied with the technical level of the architecture and the costs were piling up. excel2rlang.com was built with WordPress + rental server + Onamae.com domain, so naturally I had to painstakingly write articles in WordPress, and on top of that it cost about 3,000 yen per year. The ad revenue was basically break-even, and I wasn't really making money. Initially, I worked hard using my weekend time to write articles for money and to explain things clearly. However, once I faced the reality that it wasn't profitable, my motivation dropped drastically.

snitch0.github.io was built on GitHub Pages using the static site generator Hugo. It was a much better architecture than WordPress, and I was quite satisfied that I could make a cool-looking site. Also, one of the reasons I created snitch0.github.io was that I wanted to write more casually. While excel2rlang.com was based on the concept of "easy-to-understand and polite R explanations," I wanted snitch0.github.io to be "pure output about various things, not just R."

In the end, the update frequency for both blogs dropped, but the reason was that I got exhausted from managing multiple personas. During my previous job, I was told to refrain from social media (I think people who work at large companies will understand), so I was active under the name "snitch" borrowing my cat's name. On the former blog, I was a cheerful and crowd-pleasing Snitch, while on the latter I was a Snitch who said whatever I wanted freely—neither was really me, and it was getting confusing.

The turning point was changing jobs. After moving to a biotech venture, there was less need to hide my identity, and rather, opportunities to interact with various stakeholders both domestically and internationally increased, so I even felt the need to appeal that I'm this kind of person, I can do these things (impressive, right?).

So I decided to create a new blog on fresh ground with my identity revealed, in a self-serving manner, using gatsby + cloudflare pages.

##Why Gatsby + Cloudflare Pages

The reason was that I wanted to stop using Hugo and I didn't want to make my repository public on GitHub Pages.

###My Evaluation of Hugo

Hugo was reasonably good. I had touched Golang before so I could kind of work with it, and I could make a reasonably cool blog.

However, it somehow didn't seem logical, and I couldn't positively explain why I should use Hugo. Hugo apparently has fast builds, but honestly if you just build with GitHub automation you just leave it running, and I wasn't building anything large-scale so I didn't really feel the benefit. Also, Hugo feels like it has low extensibility. The whole thing of generating javascript from Go feels kind of roundabout.

###How to Deal with GitHub Pages

It's nice that it's free to use, but the problem is you can't use private repositories. If you're not writing anything embarrassing to make public, it's not really a problem, but only being able to use public feels uncomfortable. Your blog can be easily copied after all. I recommend paying if you're going to use it.

###The Good Things About Gatsby + Cloudflare

First, Gatsby, which is based on React, has high extensibility and editability. This was my first time using React, but it's a framework that works closely with HTML and CSS while being JavaScript/TypeScript-based, making it easy to understand. Also, there are very diverse plugins, making it easy to extend functionality. For this blog, I added plugins for prism.js, Google Fonts usage, jQuery, etc. By the way, I based it on gatsby-starter-lumen.

##What I Want to Write on This Blog

I want to output in a self-serving manner. I want to improve the quality of my learning by learning with the premise of explaining to someone about books I've read and technologies I've studied.

The motivation to write blogs for someone in trouble is no longer there (I've found that using this as driving force doesn't work for me), so please understand. Of course, if someone asks or makes a request, I'll be happy to respond.