That’s great advice and something I’ve been trying to teach my brother and others around me since some time. Well worded, so I’ll share that with him.

But here’s the thing - I read that comment and agreed with him that one can use Netlify in that situation. Now, I’m not saying you should learn Netlify’s usage top to bottom and convert all your stuff to it.

I came across Netlify when I wanted to host a linkblog. I took someone else’s code that creates Jekyll sites, and then did the bare minimum to connect it with Netlify so that I don’t have to do the build process myself. I believe that once you reach a certain level of technical competency, this is not ‘learning something new’, but problem solving itself. You don’t have to learn the ins and outs of a tool to use it. You need to jump over a goal post, and the more technical a tool (Netlify instead of writing your own build scripts, jekyll instead of WordPress, self-hosted WordPress instead of Medium or WordPress.com), the less you should worry about ‘learning it’ if you’ve got half a solution from somewhere else that you just need to massage into working for you.

The wording of that comment was poor, but the advice was well founded and specific - it was not to everyone, just to you.

If you do use Jekyll or other static site generators, why not go one step further and remove your computer from the equation so you can automate and not worry about it? I did and I’m happy. I’ve not logged into Netlify since forever and I couldn’t care less.

Again, not a solution for everyone, because the advice of ‘solving a problem instead of learning a language’ is for everyone instead. For a slightly more technical person, the ‘problem’ shifts to ‘how do I make this easier than ever?’ in my mind.