This Website

This website was created in 2015 while I was studying at University. Since then I grew a brain, got married and had two kids. I remain somewhat emotionally attached to what my former self has created and I’ve come to realize it gives me a voice - one that cannot be taken away easily.

Cronological evolution of tech stacks

Wordpress, PHP, 2015

In 2015, after 3 years of University without learning web development or server administration, I decided to try it out for myself by building this website.

I didn’t understand much of what was going on since I didn’t know Wordpress or PHP at the time, so I had to use off the shelf components and themes to publish content. Most of what I wanted to write about was about my journey of learning Linux, so a cPanel shared hosting solution wasn’t particularly interesting.

Hugo, Golang, 2016

I rented my first ever cloud server on Digital Ocean in March of 2016 with the goal of learning some sysadmin concepts and documenting the journey:

I spent so much time learning to tend to the server itself that I wrote very little in that time. My idea then was that I needed something that looked prettier that would motivate me to write more.

Ghost, Javascript, 2019

In 2019 Ghost was somewhat of a novelty and it looked amazing, with the added bonus I could host it on my existing server. It had the best WYSIWYG editor I’ve ever used which meant writing was unique immersive, but virtually every template for Ghost required posts to have images of some sort. Eventually I grew tired of having to build an image for every post I wanted to write, the CVEs became tiring to patch, and after a botched major version update, it was time to switch.

NextJS, Node.JS, 2024

I bought a Tailwind Plus lifetime license after looking at their site templates, and since it cost a decent chunk of money, I thought I was going to get a really unique looking website. Unfortunately, many people had the same idea, and I saw the exact template in the wild at least five times.

From a technical standpoint, this was a good move. I had long since stopped caring about optimizing servers, and since this template generated static HTML files, adopting it meant I could retire my server, which I did.

The website still looked great and even had light and dark themes. However, writing posts in NextJS’s version of MDX wasn’t as smooth, and every other week a new CVE would come out that wasn’t fixable with a simple npm audit fix, making the maintenance aspect somewhat painful.

Hugo, Golang, 2026

Back to basics. I can still use a static site generator without the hassle of managing servers. I really didn’t want to see my website look exactly like others, so I knew I would be making a custom theme.

It’s somewhat bloated but still quite simple to get up and running, and moving to Hugo from NextJS was smoother than I expected, thanks to some help from AI.