Wordpress To Golang

2017-09-24

Less tech is better, so when reaching for a blog I skipped wordpress and picked up golang. A couple years ago Ruby on Rails was a consideration but using that would push me to use more expensive virtual machines.

Wordpress runs the internet, at least a significant share of it. The wiki page mentions 27.5% of the top 10 million websites as of February 2017 which is impressive. My biggest gripe with Wordpress is how slow and bloated it is.

Ruby is a great technology, it makes for happier devs just like its creator Yukihiro Matsumoto wanted.

I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.

Yukihiro Matsumoto 2008 Google Tech Talk 'Ruby 1.9'

The simple reason for not using Ruby is its what I use for work, generally, and I want to learn something new.

I could have chosen Elixir, or Rust or Node.js. However I've gone for golang, I read about the creation of golang and it's authors pain points for existing languages. What really stood out to me was the focus on simplicity. Clear and simple syntax with few options to do something in more than one way. Sometimes this means ending up writing more code, but I strongly believe it is worth it.

Here is my blog. It's running the latest golang, paired with Postgresql, running on $5 vultr.com VM's located in 4 different data centres around the world. To find the reader's closest server I use ns1.com's free DNS hosting. SSL certs are issued for free by letsencrypt.org.