People and Blogs: Ben Borgers

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi! I'm Ben Borgers, and I'm in my last year studying Computer Science at Tufts University in the U.S.

I've really enjoyed working at startups over the past couple years, and have had the opportunity to learn a lot from working at Buttondown, Luma, Locket, and Notion.

At my university, I run a club called JumboCode where teams of students build software for non-profits.

In my free time, I really enjoy working on my own side projects!

What's the story behind your blog?

In high school, I decided that I wanted to start publishing blog posts about little bits of things that I was learning from programming. I started publishing blog posts and started getting a bit of traffic from Google SEO, which was really cool to see.

I kept writing these posts about technical topics, and then in my first year of college, I challenged myself to write a blog post every day. I kept it up for about six months, and that was a really fun experience (although a bit tiring and I was glad to end it).

I find that my website itself is a form of self-expression, so I end up getting the itch to rebuild it every couple of months to change the design and layout.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I keep a list of topic ideas, but most of the time I end up writing a post when I feel inspired and not when I'm looking to pull an idea off my list. I try to think of ideas from projects that I've been working on or opinions that have crystalized in my mind recently.

I write my blog posts either in a code editor (like VS Code) or, more recently, MarkEdit, which I've really been enjoying.

I don't really enjoy editing my writing, so I often just write one draft and then try to sleep on it. I come back and run through it, try to edit the writing so it flows a bit better and is clearer, and then just publish it.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I don't think I have a particular space that helps me, but it definitely helps me to write blog posts when I'm in a mental space of being really excited or passionate about what I'm writing about.

Sometimes I'll have an idea on my list for months, and then suddenly I'm thinking about how I would write a post, and if I write it in that moment it'll all flow out a lot easier than if I sit down and try to force it.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

In recent years my blog has always been built with Astro and Tailwind CSS and hosted on Vercel or Cloudflare. The blog posts have been in markdown (using Astro's content collections).

Keeping everything in markdown has allowed me to bring the posts with me really easily every time I redesign the site. Whenever I redesign, I make a new branch of the GitHub repo and start over with a fresh Astro site — so it really helps to be able to copy the directory of markdown posts over without any additional futzing.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I'd probably make a promise to myself to just keep all the posts in markdown from the start, for ease of portability. I've had stints of writing posts in Ghost, or in Notion and using the API to extract content, or even using GitHub Issues as a CMS.

In the end, I always just had to extract all my posts and put them back into markdown, which wasn't a lot of fun. It's hard to not get enamored by new shiny CMS options, but I'd say that in the long run I want to always keep it in markdown — it's just the simplest and "lowest common denominator" for me.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I don't pay anything for Vercel's hosting, and I pay $12/year for the domain benborgers.com. It doesn't really generate any revenue, except for the occasional person who lands on a blog post and gets in touch with me to do some consulting work — usually it's because they land on the blog post for opensheet, a free API I built and host to get Google Sheets as JSON.

I did for a while switch my website to the domain ben.page, which costs an absolutely frivolous $540/year. I eventually decided that I like benborgers.com more for my personal website, but that I like to use subdomains of ben.page for personal projects (like photos.ben.page or tufts.ben.page or queue.ben.page). That leaves me paying for both domains — but oh well.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

• jmduke.com — my boss at Buttondown (Read Justin's interview).
• jero.zone — my friend who goes to Brown University.
• buildingslack.com — stories about the early days of building Slack.
• pketh.org — posts about building Kinopio, a really cool piece of indie software.
• simonwillison.net — how I've been trying to keep up with news about AI.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I think my Photo of the Day project is one I'm really proud of, and that I've been doing for over a year! Also if I had to highlight one post on my blog, it'd be this one about sneaking forks into the dining hall.