> [!Caution] Bad Practice Alert!\*\* > > I typically advise against refactoring at the first sign of repetition. > > Yes, "DRY" is important, but getting an abstraction wrong is much worse. Experienced developers typically aren't surprised to hear this, but junior devs often over-abstract because they've been taught to refactor everything they see twice. > In reality, repeated code is often much more readable and maintainable than a bad abstraction. > > But for my website? I overdid it. Because... well, it’s my website—I can do what I want. ## Inspirations ### Getting into Obsidian I started using [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) for notes and blog posts. I love it because it’s local-first, lets me write in markdown, and gives me a cool graph view of my notes. So I thought, why not have my Obsidian notes show up directly on my website? ### Living in the Terminal At the same time, I got really into using the terminal. You can check out my [dotfiles](https://github.com/tamjidrahman/dotfiles) (by the way, I use Neovim ;)). So I thought, wouldn’t it be great to manage my blog posts from the terminal? ### Overengineering I find when I work on personal projects, it's really easy for me to overinvest in the infrastructure. When Vinesh and I wrote [ZQL](https://genzql.com), I spent a lot of time building a CI/CD pipeline for it. We need 99.9% reliabilty you know? So I decided I needed to automate all parts of writing the blog posts before I actually got to writing anything meaningful. That’s why I built a system where I write blog posts in markdown, store them in a folder, and they automatically appear on my site. ## How It Works ### Building the Blog Post Now, creating a blog post is as simple as writing a markdown file with the right frontmatter. My Next.js blog app looks for these files in a specific directory, and voila—the post is live! Here’s the first few lines of this post, for example: ```markdown --- title: My Blog Post Management System description: Managing posts for this site date: 2024-10-12 tags: - projects --- ## Inspirations ### Getting into [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) I started using Obsidian to write my notes and blog posts... ``` During the build step (also automated using github actions), the build step generates all the static metadata for the posts and creates the necessary pages. This way, I can focus on writing the content and not worry about the routes. ### Custom Components The posts themselves actually get rendered as React Nodes, so I can modify them like I might any other React component. This is especially useful for adding custom components or styles to specific posts. For example, here are the custom overrides for this post: ```tsx

(

{children}

), h3: ({ children, ...props }) => (

{children}

), a: ({ href, children, ...props }) => ( {children} ), }} remarkPlugins={[remarkGfm, remarkAlert]} // GitHub-flavored markdown rehypePlugins={[rehypeHighlight]} // Syntax highlighting for code blocks > {post.content}

``` And that’s it! I can now write blog posts in markdown, store them in a folder, and they automatically appear on my site. I can even add custom components or styles to specific posts. Now to actually write some posts...

👋, I'm Tamjid