As all good programmers do when learning something new, I’m starting this blog with Hello World! In this first article I hope to accomplish the following:

  • Why did I decide to start this blog?
    • What do I want out of this?
  • What to expect
  • How did I make it?

Why make a blog?

The idea of a blog has been in the back of my mind for a while now. Looking back at the last year of notes, I’ve found various ideas and pages tagged as “blog post” ranging from technology to project management. I think as I’ve grown as an engineer and expanded my knowledge base, I’ve gained more ideas that are worth sharing. Hopefully my readers will agree and can gain some value out of these posts. At the very least I will use this as another medium in which to capture ideas and express myself. An additional goal for myself is to use this as a living project to explore and learn the Go programming language (a 2025 goal for myself).

I plan on using this blog to share ideas on programming, projects, organization as well as write how to articles on topics such as Obsidian, Liquibase, and more. Additionally I may write on current events in the programming world that I find interesting, though I will probably shy away from popular mainstream topics, so don’t expect to find a ton of AI posts here. I want to post weekly, but as I write those words, it feels like a lofty goal. If I can hit that 80% of the time I’ll be pretty happy with this. Posts are probably going to be relatively short (between 500 and 2000 words). Once I learn more about Hugo and Go, I’ll begin adding images.

Now to switch gears a bit, I want to dive in to how I created this blog and what my process was for choosing the technology stack I did.

How I decided to make a blog…

So many options…

My first instinct was to look into free hosting options. I remembered using GitHub pages for some project a long time ago, so that was my first choice. The GitHub Pages landing page has a section at the bottom about blogging with Jekyll that piqued my interest, so I continued reading about Jekyll, only to find it was based in Ruby. In the past I’ve had an unpleasant experience with Ruby, so the idea of installing it again was a non-starter.

After ruling out Jekyll, I decided to google for some other static site generators and found an overwhelming amount. These included:

  • Hugo
  • AstroJs
  • 11ty
  • etc.

With so many options, I wondered if the juice was worth the squeeze in generating a static site. I kept the idea in the back of my mind, but started looking at other platforms. I briefly considered WordPress since I’ve maintained WordPress sites before, but I felt that there is too much functionality and overhead to bother with. I also considered dev.to as I am an avid reader of articles posted there, but I didn’t want to be limited to just programming and programming adjacent categories.

The decision: Hugo

After ruling out blog sites, I decided to take inventory of what I really wanted to get out of the blog site from a technical perspective. I landed on the following:

  • Use tools I already use every day (git, GitHub, VS Code, etc.)
  • Prefer to write things in Markdown
  • Tie the blog platform in with another 2025 goal

I briefly considered AstroJS given that my go to scripting language is Node/Javascript, but ultimately landed on Hugo . At that point I started researching Hugo on YouTube and reading the start up documentation to learn more. I found this video that was a good help with understanding the structure. Once I felt comfortable I downloaded Hugo using Chocolatey and created a new project.

I found the Tailwind theme on the Hugo site and installed it as a submodule. As I got closer to completing the site, I began to wonder how I was going set up the page hosting. Should I got with a folder I upload every time or use GitHub Actions. I found this video that had a gist for an action to build and upload the site using an Action, so I decided to go with that.

Reflections

Overall I’ve enjoyed writing this blog and the thought of expanding on it with new Go templates excites me. I found that this post flowed very well and was very easy to write once I got into the groove. I hope the next ones will be as easy to write. I’ve got may ideas in my knowledge bank (maybe that will be one of my next few posts), so stay tuned for more soon!