echo "Hello world";

I decided to setup my own website. A little space on the web for me to write stuff on, I need to keep it somewhere after all. If nothing else, may this serve as some sort of portfolio to show off what I’ve worked on in my carreer as a software developer.

Aside from blog posts and boasting about project contributions I want to also put some fun stuff, just for me, on here.

With no experience in writing I assume this is going to be a slow start, but fingers crossed this doesn’t end in the bin.

Hugo⌗

So I was looking at creating my own website, naturally my mind presented me with the classic WordPress solution. The only experience I have with it is in setting one up for my sister, an experience I’d like to rob myself from doing again. It is not afwul, obviously, but it certainly doesn’t come naturaly to me to use it. I set my sights on a static site generator to satisfy my desire for a code-first solution.

Remembering that static site generators exist, this seemed like a good direction to head in. Code and templates generating my site, perfect!

But which to choose? There’s only a billion of them…

Did I figure out my requirements, compiled a candidate list and sorted it for matching my needs? I wish…

Nope, I wish, instead I confidently googled “static site generator” and hit the first result that was not a blogpost explaining what a JAMstack is.

https://gohugo.io/
Hugo: The world’s fastest framework for building websites

Not caring much for the headlines I head for the themes section to see if this was going to produce anything interresting looking without much effort. The top themes looked nice, but soon I found panr/hugo-theme-terminal. It struck a cord with me, being overtly techy and nerdy looking while also embracing a minimal look based on a single theme color. That is my JAMstack!

But what actually is hugo? So it generates sites using markdown files (exactly what I wanted) but also has a very flexible content system. Besides being able to create posts you can create different classes of content. What makes this interresting is the templating system, which allows you to create templates for each type of content.

It’s fast⌗

Like, rediculously fast.

As a webdev working with javascript that gets compiled with webpack and about a gigabyte of dependencies, the bar is not high. But still, it is so fast I couldn’t believe it. The whole site generates in milliseconds… Now to be fair I don’t have much on the site at the time of writing, but still this is rediculously fast compared to what I’m used working with.

And then of course it also has live-reloading during development, which is an absolute treat when exploring a new technology.