Well it started after wordpress fucked up my formatting and replaced -- with — (em dash) one too many times. The whole PHP stack isn't exactly pleasant to manage in the best of days, and looming threat of WP having another bug and getting owned of no fault of my own was also a factor.
I wanted something simple that was just markdown for actual content, no database or anything more fancy. I have considered static gen and even eventually migrated my old blog to it as archive (not in english, and cringe anyway). But it really started as "well, it looks like fun thing to do and I will be scratching the itch I had, why not".
Mind you, that was in 2012, the first version was in asynchronous(!) Perl, Ghost didn't even exist at that point (and I didn't wanted to touch JS anyway), let alone any other alternative. It even did respectable ~3ms per render of the page.
I rewrote it in Go to learn some stuff and in the process also yeeted comment processing and just farmed it out to externals (self hosted, not written by me) app, as that's probably the most annoying and thankless part of blog engine when you include all kinds of spam detection that would need to be written.
On the nearby cementery I also have unfinished Go z80 emu (I did learn a bit about using Dear ImGui from it) and it rewrite in Rust (because what's better first project than that?), just coz I wanted to see just how much faster CRust is compared to CGo interop(answer = a lot, rendering part got from >4ms to below 0.5ms).
I did it to the point where it could run some code, and quite fast too, I think it was down to few ns per instruction, and 8 byte prog ran in like 11 ns, which I kinda didn't expect from Go. It didn't emulate instruction delay tho, which would be required to emulate it with peripherals.
Program decoder was just...256 byte array with function pointers generated out of operator list, which probably helped