Creating this dev-blog

I have, for some time now, been contemplating a need to create a website to host my thoughts and project overviews. This is a standard practice among software engineers. Some start on Medium, some create a Susbtack, and some create their own websites.

How is this built?

• Compiled with Zola.
• Currently themed using serene.
• Hosted on GitHub Pages.
• Written with markdown.

Why Zola?

My (now outdated) portfolio website <code>digital, is currently compiled with React using NEXT.js. This was a fun learning experience, and I may like to revisit modern web stacks as a whole, but my current goal is to produce as much output as I am taking in input. That means adopting a fast/simple static-site generator that can support some markdown and maybe other neat features on an as-needed basis. So when I started looking into creating this site, I focused in on simplicity.

My next stop of investigation was to briefly consider Hugo. Go is on my wishlist of programming languages to learn, and Hugo is a well-recognized library. So I started a tutorial, installed Hugo with wget, and got to creating the website you’re reading right now…

Actually, I didn’t do that. Instead, I did some research. It turns out that Hugo uses the Go template engine, which is noticeably dissimilar to Jinja.¹ So much so, that a developer built his own templating system Tera and static site generator (Zola). This was enough for me to make the jump.

Why make this?

Provides me with:

• A place to store my thoughts for me.
• A place to store/share project ideas.
• A public way to force myself to complete projects.

I find that I often have ideas and thoughts that I would love to share with others which I often lose to the moment. I could have a conversation with an interesting conclusion, or a one-liner thought that I want to expand on. Unless I write these things down, I am likely to forget them and move on. This goes against one of my intrinsic motivations: “contributing to the expansion of knowledge / possibility”.

Speaking of motivation, I struggle with perfectionism. When I start a project, I must complete it perfectly. If I cannot achieve this, I will move onto something else. This influences my ability to work on personal projects in a way that I do not appreciate. I have started to work on many projects, few of which have seen the light of day. This dev-blog presents a great way to provide an explicit extrinsic motivator for working on things: prying eyes. Hopefully, the prospect of readers such as yourself viewing my work in an in-progress and completed state will motivate me to action.

Cheers,

Xavier