Hello World

For the longest time, I thought about creating my own space where I can write whatever I want. Throughout the years I’ve written on Medium and Substack.

So why not use those instead?

Substack provided a good environment to post whatever I wanted. However, the issue I found with Subastack was that it was difficult for people to find it. On the other hand, while, Medium has a wonderful community of readers and writers, there were some posts where I wanted to share half baked ideas without having to worry about feedback from others.

In the end, I wanted a medium (ha) to share content with an audience while at the same time have the freedom to post more. I think my personal blog is a good medium for that. I could also cross post these posts to Medium if I wanted.

I chose to build this site with Hugo, a static website generator. Why Hugo?

Speed

Hugo boasts to be the fastest static site generator on the market.

It.is.BLAZING fast. It built this website in less than 200ms. Additional changes to the project rebuilt the changes in ~20ms. I used Jekyll (another static website generator) in the past and it was definitely much slower. I’m curious to see how the build time increase as more files get added.

hugo server -D
=>
                   | EN
-------------------+-----
  Pages            | 18
  Paginator pages  |  0
  Non-page files   |  0
  Static files     | 14
  Processed images |  0
  Aliases          |  1
  Sitemaps         |  1
  Cleaned          |  0

Built in 189 ms

Templates

There are a million templates to choose from. Using templates is straightforward in Hugo. You just need to git clone a theme in the themes folder an set the theme in config.toml. The Anatole theme had great docs for getting started. This made spinning up a website super quick.

Final thoughts

Half way building this website, I regretted using a templated website and I wanted to start over. I wanted more customizability of the design and layout of the website. Using an existing theme template made it hard to customize. I also had to familiarize myself with the Hugo project structure and Anatole theme to customize things that weren’t in the documentmentation i.e. using a non-default html layout for the main page.

Next time I will make this site with barebones HTML, CSS and Javascript to customize to my hearts desire.