About This Site

This site was built with hugo and the PaperModX Theme (using a fork of a fork at the moment).

I decided to go with an existing theme rather than creating my own this time, to one save time but also to give the site a more consistent feel. I am no designer and I felt my last website (v3), really felt like a bunch of different websites thrown together. It was a great way to learn React, TailwindCSS and a bunch of other technologies.

Technologies Used

Why Move to Hugo?

I also had a bunch of issues even building the site recently. I had a scheduled job to rebuild it so that the stats page would update with the most viewed articles etc. The final straw for me was not being to easily add a new page for talks. I recently was lucky enough to give a talk at Europython and wanted to share that on my website but realised with my old Gatsby site that would be a bit of a pain to add. I could also no longer easily upgrade my site to the latest version of Gatsby v4 due to the old plugins I relied on. Mostly it was essentially an issue with me, that I no longer wanted to put in the effort to maintain the site.

So I decided to take a look at something easier to maintain but that would still look great. I have been learning Golang and decided to take a look at Hugo. One thing I noticed right away was how fast it was to build the site. Roughly speaking the old site used to take ~120 seconds to build and this site takes < 1 second.

Anecdotally I noticed the hot reloader seems to work better but again I was using a v2 of Gatsby. Overall I am pretty happy with this new site. Using Hugo archetypes and page-bundles. I have moved all of my articles within this repo, making it far easier to create new blog posts and test draft posts.

So hopefully I will be blogging more often 🤣 (I’m looking at you 2 posts in 2022, as of the time of writing)!

👴 Older iterations:

You can find older iterations of this site here: