On Jekyll, Unix, and the idea that complexity is best managed through simplicity.
Every project needs a name.
Some names are carefully engineered. Others emerge from a late-night idea, a passing reference, or a word that just sounds right.
Simpyll started somewhere in between.
The original inspiration was pretty straightforward: simple + Jekyll.
Jekyll, the static site generator closely associated with GitHub Pages, represented something I appreciated about the web. You could write content, generate a website, and publish it without maintaining a complicated backend or an elaborate infrastructure.
There was something appealing about that.
Take a collection of files, apply a little structure, and turn them into something useful.
I liked the simplicity. I liked the connection to GitHub. And I liked the idea of building a personal corner of the internet without needing an entire platform behind it.
Somewhere along the way, simple and Jekyll became Simpyll.
It was a little unusual, easy to remember, and just nerdy enough to feel appropriate.
But the more I thought about what I wanted to build, the more the name started to mean something else.
Something bigger than a static website.
The Unix Idea
I've always been drawn to the philosophy behind Unix and Linux.
Not necessarily because they're simple systems. Anyone who has spent enough time configuring Linux knows that simplicity is not always the first word that comes to mind.
What interests me is the philosophy underneath them.
In the early development of Unix, a particular approach to software design emerged: instead of building one enormous program responsible for everything, build smaller programs that each perform a specific task.
Make those programs reliable.
Give them consistent ways to communicate.
Then combine them to solve larger problems.
Doug McIlroy, one of the early architects of Unix, helped articulate this philosophy:
Make each program do one thing well.
That principle sounds almost too obvious to be interesting.
Of course software should do its job well.
But the important part isn't just doing one thing. It's what becomes possible when independent pieces are designed to work together.
A small utility might not be particularly impressive on its own. Neither is a pipe connecting two commands.
But connect enough useful tools, and suddenly you can accomplish something surprisingly sophisticated.
The complexity doesn't disappear.
It becomes manageable through composition.
That's the part that has always stuck with me.
Simplicity Is Not the Absence of Complexity
There's an important distinction between something being simple and something being simplistic.
A simplistic solution ignores complexity.
A simple solution understands complexity well enough to organize it.
Those are very different things.
A well-designed system can accomplish extraordinarily complicated tasks while remaining understandable at the level of its individual components.
Think about a command-line pipeline:
cat access.log | grep "ERROR" | sort | uniq -c
Each utility has a relatively narrow responsibility.
One reads data. Another filters it. Another sorts it. Another counts repeated lines.
Together, they create something more useful than any one component could accomplish alone.
You don't need to rewrite the filtering utility every time you want to analyze a different file.
You don't need a specialized application for every combination of operations.
You assemble the tools you already have.
And when your needs change, you change the composition.
This is an incredibly powerful idea.
It also suggests something that applies far beyond software:
The best way to manage complexity isn't always to eliminate it. Sometimes it's to give it better boundaries.
Why This Matters to Simpyll
When I started building Simpyll, I knew I wanted a personal website.
A place to write, share projects, document experiments, and explore ideas.
But I didn't want to create a complicated system just for the sake of having one.
I wanted something that could grow organically.
A blog shouldn't need to know how a project portfolio works.
A project page shouldn't need to understand how an article gets published.
A publishing workflow shouldn't require me to manually rebuild the entire website every time I write something.
Each piece should have a responsibility.
Each piece should work independently where practical.
And together, those pieces should form a cohesive experience.
That's the ideal, anyway.
The actual development process has involved plenty of experimentation, unexpected problems, and moments where something that seemed simple turned out to be anything but.
I've encountered build failures, hydration issues, publishing problems, and the occasional feature that became much more complicated than I originally intended.
But that's part of the process.
Simplicity isn't something you achieve once and preserve forever.
It's something you continually work toward.
Sometimes that means introducing a new abstraction.
Sometimes it means removing one.
And sometimes it means admitting that the clever solution you spent hours building probably wasn't necessary in the first place.
Build Small. Connect Everything.
One of my favorite things about the Unix philosophy is that it doesn't demand you predict the future.
In fact, it encourages almost the opposite.
Build something useful now.
Give it a clear purpose.
Make it capable of working with other things.
Then let future needs determine what comes next.
This is how I want Simpyll to evolve.
The website itself is one project, but it isn't the only one I want to explore.
I'm interested in building software tools, medical calculators, healthcare education resources, databases, and experiments involving artificial intelligence.
Some of those ideas might become substantial applications.
Others might remain small utilities.
A few might never make it beyond an experiment.
That's fine.
Not every idea needs to become a platform.
Not every project needs to become a business.
Not every experiment needs to justify its existence through some grand long-term vision.
Sometimes building something small, useful, and understandable is enough.
And sometimes those small things become the foundation for something much larger.
The Temptation to Build Everything
There's an interesting contradiction in software development.
The more capable our tools become, the easier it is to build things we don't actually need.
Modern frameworks, cloud platforms, APIs, and AI-assisted development make it possible to assemble sophisticated applications with remarkably little effort compared to the past.
That's exciting.
It's also dangerous in a very ordinary way.
When adding another feature becomes easy, it's tempting to keep adding features.
When building another abstraction takes only a few minutes, it's tempting to keep creating abstractions.
Eventually, a small project can become an elaborate collection of systems that exist primarily to support one another.
I've already felt that temptation while developing Simpyll.
There's always another feature to implement, another optimization to make, another interesting technical problem to solve.
And to be clear, I enjoy that part.
Experimentation is one of the reasons the project exists.
But I also want to develop the discipline to ask a more important question:
Does this actually make the system better?
Not more impressive.
Not more complicated.
Not more technically interesting.
Better.
Sometimes the answer will be yes.
Other times, the best feature is the one I decide not to build.
A Philosophy Beyond Software
What I appreciate most about this way of thinking is how easily it extends beyond programming.
In healthcare, complicated systems depend on people, processes, and technologies performing distinct responsibilities while communicating effectively.
In education, difficult subjects become more approachable when broken into concepts that can be understood individually and connected progressively.
Even learning to program follows a similar pattern.
You don't need to understand every layer of a modern application before you can build something useful.
You learn one concept.
Then another.
You connect them.
Eventually, things that once seemed impossibly complicated begin to make sense.
That's not because the complexity vanished.
It's because you've developed a way to organize it.
I find that idea reassuring, particularly as someone approaching software development from a background outside traditional computer science.
I don't need to know everything before I start.
I need to understand the next piece well enough to build it.
Then I can move on to the next.
A Name That Became a Direction
So why Simpyll?
Originally, it was a play on Jekyll and the word simple.
That's still part of the story.
But today, I think the name represents something more deliberate.
It's a reminder to favor clarity over cleverness.
To build components that serve a purpose.
To create systems that can grow without becoming impossible to understand.
To experiment freely without assuming every experiment needs to become something enormous.
And to remember that sophisticated things don't necessarily require sophisticated beginnings.
I don't expect Simpyll to embody these principles perfectly.
In fact, I'm almost certain I'll violate them repeatedly as I learn.
I'll overengineer things.
I'll build features I don't need.
I'll occasionally make something complicated when a much simpler approach was available.
Then, hopefully, I'll recognize it and make things better.
That's part of learning.
And that's part of what this website is meant to document.
Simpyll isn't really about achieving some perfect state of minimalism.
It's about pursuing simplicity while building things that matter to me.
One idea.
One component.
One experiment at a time.
Keep the pieces simple. Let the possibilities become complex.
That's Simpyll.
About the philosophy
The ideas discussed here draw from the original Unix design tradition, particularly the work of Doug McIlroy and his collaborators at Bell Labs.
For anyone interested in the history, Bell Labs' account of the Unix philosophy is an excellent starting point.