Why I'm Rebuilding My Blog From Scratch (and Leaving Medium)

For a few years, everything I wrote lived on Medium. It was easy: open the editor, type, hit publish. No servers, no CSS, no decisions. That convenience is exactly why it took me so long to leave.

But convenience has a price, and I finally got tired of paying it.

The problem with renting your audience

When you publish on someone else's platform, you don't own the relationship with your readers — the platform does. Your work sits behind their paywall, gets ranked by their algorithm, and reaches people on their terms. If they change the rules tomorrow, there's nothing you can do.

You don't own your audience on a platform. You rent it. And the landlord can raise the rent, change the locks, or sell the building at any time.

The single most valuable thing a writer can build is a direct line to the people who care about their work. On Medium, I never had that. I had followers I couldn't email and a body of work I didn't fully control.

What I actually want

So I sat down and wrote out what I wanted from a home for my writing:

- Ownership. My content, my domain, my design.

- A direct line to readers. An email list, not a follower count.

- A site that looks like mine — not the same template every other writer uses.

- Room to grow beyond iOS into web, AI, and whatever I get curious about next.

None of that is possible on a rented platform. All of it is possible on my own site.

The stack

I'm keeping it deliberately simple and modern:

export function getAllPosts(): Post[] {
  return fs
    .readdirSync(POSTS_DIR)
    .filter((f) => f.endsWith(".mdx"))
    .map((f) => readPostFile(f))
    .sort((a, b) => +new Date(b.date) - +new Date(a.date));
}

The whole thing is a Next.js site deployed on Vercel, with a proper CMS behind it so publishing stays as easy as it was on Medium — I write in a browser, hit publish, and it's live. The difference is that now the front door is mine.

The goal isn't to make publishing harder. It's to keep publishing easy while making everything around it — the design, the audience, the ownership — yours.

What's next

This site is the foundation. Over the coming weeks I'll be writing about what I'm learning as I build — across iOS, the web, and AI — and sharing the real, tested details instead of the polished-after-the-fact version.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, the best way to follow along is the newsletter below. It's the one place I can reach you directly, and that's the whole point.