In the past decade I built a dozen apps as side-projects, and in all of the cases, those that didn’t depend on any vendor or platform survived way longer than those that did. Not only the very platform-coupled like a game I built for facebook, but also apps hosted on heroku. On trying to get some advantage, theoretical less work in maintaince, or speed up in development I always got burned.

The reason of that is that those platforms always change, their APIs, their rules, their business models, stealing a considerate amount of your time over and over, migrating, upgrading, adapting. Having your own small linux server and controlling your own stuff actually gives you way less maintaince burden (even if you have to backup databases yourself).

This is why the Hello World post of this blog is actually not the first post of the entire blog, but in the middle. I’m migrating away from Medium as primary way of writing. I didn’t want to fall on the trick many developers do to spend more time building their blog than actually writing, so I actually wanted to start writting on Tumblr, then Medium, then Dev.to, now Substack is the hottest thing, but platforms come and go all the time.

Not anymore, building my own blog is the safest long-term solution no matter how basic it is, I will just slap some markdowns together and that’s it. I may, however, copy and paste some of my posts in those other platforms, to try and get some distribution.

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