I just retired my old WordPress site and rebuilt
markjbrown.com as a static Jekyll site hosted on
GitHub Pages. The old site had been on Azure App Service for years and was
quietly costing me money to host content I wasn’t even maintaining.
A few things I like about the new setup:
- Free hosting. GitHub Pages costs $0 for public repos.
- No surface area to attack. No WordPress admin, no PHP, no database, no
plugins to patch.
- Git is the CMS. Writing a post is
git commit && git push. Editing
happens in any editor — and PRs give me a built-in review workflow.
- The site IS the source. No more “where did I write that?” — it’s all
Markdown in a public repo at
github.com/markjbrown/markjbrown.github.io.
I’m planning to start writing again here — mostly about the stuff I’m working
on day-to-day on the Azure Cosmos DB team: data modeling at scale, vector
search, multi-agent AI patterns, and the surprises that fall out of running
real workloads in distributed systems.
More soon.
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