Moving Away From Medium (mostly) to GitHub Pages For My Blog

I’ll keep this one short, because it’s a small decision with a small amount of reasons for the choice. For the past few years I have been using Medium as my writing platform. It’s been great, and continues to be great for the same reasons…

1. Zero administration. This one has been huge. I didn’t want to take the time to deal with setting things up, or (worse) fixing things when they stopped working. I wanted to only write periodically and didn’t want to maintain anything.
2. Decent writing experience. This is more of a 4 of 5 stars. Writing code in Medium has always been a challenge, especially with inline code and strange things like different types of quote characters. It is a little easier with bigger chunks of code with the integration with GitHub Gists. But it was definitely good enough. And for non-code writing, it is perfect.
3. User base. This was the largest benefit to me. I am by no means a name in any technical community, but I somehow exceed 10,000+ views on my writing monthly. That’s amazing. And because of that, I’ll be mirroring my posts from my new blog/site to Medium.

But as I’ve thought more about it recently, there are a few different things I want to focus on with my writing, including the platform I publish on.

1. I don’t really own the content in Medium. At the end of the day, the copies of my articles are living on Medium’s servers. And if anything ever happened, it’s not an easy thing to get my writing. I’m sure there is some way to export, but this isn’t the process I’m looking for. Having a git repo is what I know and what I’m used to, so GitHub Pages is part of my natural dev workflow.
2. It’s a mixed platform, and not completely dedicated to tech. This is fine and a great thing for most writers and readers, but for me this is not what I am looking for anymore. My preference now is to have a simple platform that is mine.
3. Building my brand. I think this is where having “my own space” could be a good feeling as I continue to build my brand.

I am by no means saying Medium is a bad platform. The opposite, actually. It’s great. But just not for me 100% anymore.