TBF, I've had a self-hosted blog for about 6 years. I just chose a platform that I didn't understand in order to prevent me from wasting time yak shaving on the

TBF, I've had a self-hosted blog for about 6 years. I just chose a platform that I didn't understand in order to prevent me from wasting time yak shaving on the means of hosting and just write content so have never actually performed the learning part of step 1. I've mostly got away with it in the past - it's survived much heavier hackernewsings - but I think I installed a plugin recently that was rather more costly than it should have been, and then the fact that I hadn't previously looked under the hood bit me. Edit: It's also worth noting I don't think principle 1 is always a good idea. This advice is very specifically optimised for the case of joining an existing company with an existing product and an existing team. If you're starting from scratch you should do more up front investigation and thinking things through. though maybe not orders of magnitude more.