markjgsmith

Investigating long Netlify deploy times

I've been looking into why the Netlify deploy times have increased by several minutes. It's a real mystery because I'm only adding at most a few new markdown files to the build each day, yet somehow the netlify CLI is reporting that ~3200 files are different and need re-uploading. That clearly takes a long time.

The only thing I can think that might cause it is creating the post archives. Perhaps I'm creating some of the pages from a javascript Object and the order of items is changing each time. That's a possibility. There's nothing on actual pages that should be changing each time.

Anyway it's a bit tricky to test because I have to do 2 builds one after the other then compare them. Comparing using diff is easy, but comparing visually will be difficult because the staging environment only has one deploy target, but I'll need to deploy 2 builds.

Hopefully I'll figure it out. #

Two noticeable trends from food vendors this morning. Maniacle evil laughter from both women and men. Women vendors denying me buying food, only for a man vendor to jump in and sell me said food. Just another day in weirdland. There's always something that I'm being blamed for, every single day, a new thing that I've supposedly done wrong.

Whenever I trace it back, the escallations usually turn out to have been for something they did to me. #

It can take a long time

I wrote a couple of days ago about the blogging virtuous circle. The idea is to have a repeatable set of steps that on average result in you writting some good quality blog posts every day. I'm still not really there yet, but I'm getting better at it.

When I started out blogging back around 2005, I wrote enthusiastically for several months, but it fizzled out eventually. I knew I needed a better routine. Twitter came along, and that was great, especially in the early days, but I had a nagging feeling that I really should be posting on my own site. There were a handful of people online that were running linkblogs. Basically self hosted sites where they posted interesting links they found on the web. I thought this was a great idea almost as soon as I saw it. I could see that this could be a fun, more frictionless way to publish that could increase overall blog output.

But there was no software available to do what I wanted. Since I also wanted to learn web development, I decided to take it on as a project and build some linkblogging software. I successfully built a linkblogging SaaS, but I ran out of runway, and ultimately had to shutdown the project.

All the while though I had been posting to the linkblog. There were many versions of the software and the archives in a way are a record of my web development journey. Though the SaaS project is no more, my personal linkblog lives on. It's been over 10 years that I've been posting links!

These days I run a newsletter, and I've made some exploratory and quite experimental podcast episodes. I feel like I'm closer to getting the balance right. The point I'm making is that if you are on the fence about whether to start blogging, the best time to start is today. Start out by just posting links to interesting articles. Your voice matters. Over time you'll be able to build that into a blog, newsletter, podcast, whatever. The important thing is to start.

These days there are much better tools out there to build your own linkblog, and also many online linkblogging services. It's the easy way to get started with blogging. What have you got to lose? #