Keep it simple, stupid
As I am starting to consider my next career move, it was high time I stopped procrastinating my personal website. With my experience in web development being largely aimed towards more heavy-duty stacks, one of my main priorities with this portfolio site was to come back to simpler roots:
- Simple to develop: this is a simple static website – no need to have React and all the bells and whistles;
- Simple to deploy: No need for an IaaS cloud provider, Github Pages should be plenty enough;
- Simple to update: the chosen solution needs to integrate with a very basic CI/CD pipeline.
For this reason, I looked for the first time into templating solutions and found Hugo, and more specifically a theme called Hugo-Profile which suits my needs beautifully.
While Hugo has its own quirks and takes a bit of time to get used to, this has been overall a great solution for me. Turns out not everything needs to be built with the same requirements as the most robust web applications ever, especially when you are making a static website with low traffic.
Using this theme has allowed me to focus on the content of the portfolio while spending minimal time on its UI/UX. Of course the interface wasn’t 100% to my liking and required tweaks, but having such a complete base theme instead of a white page helped save a lot of time.
It also integrates beautifully with Github Actions to do the Hugo generations of the files that is necessary for CI/CD purposes, making this a very easy website to maintain.