Hello World! 😜

Be forewarned, this is not the typical theme/genre behind these posts, but my inner geek feels obligated to share some of the technologies being leveraged “behind-the-scenes” which make this site possible.

Most of the heavy lifting is done by hugo. Hugo is an open-source static site generator. I chose to use it because I wanted something fast, I wanted to learn something new, and I wanted to have complete control and ownership over all the moving parts (i.e., I did not want to use platform).

I purchased my domain from namecheap for about $10 and that’s about the extent of the investment required (barring your time) to keep something like this up and running.

Hosting and continuous integration is handled via netlify which has been incredible. It truly is as simple as (1) connect a repository, (2) add build settings, and (3) deploy. Their support is equally fantastic – I had a few noob DNS questions and they responded quickly and comprehensively.

As far as the actual code, all of this is primarily HTML, CSS, Markdown, and a few sprinkles of JavaScript. All of the source code is available in this GitHub repo. Granted, this code is pretty messy – I am not a web developer and I (stubbornly) chose not use a hugo theme. I wanted to better understand all the ins-and-outs, but in retrospect, I probably should have just used a pre-built theme. As a result, if you explore the code, you’ll likely observe a lot of bad practices and less-than-ideal utilization of templates and partials.

Any non-branded (e.g. SoundCloud, clyp.it, etc.) sound bits are made possible by plyr.io – a simple, accessible, and customizable media player for video, audio, YouTube, and Vimeo.

Finally, I did use another piece of tech worth calling out. Specifically, this site leverages tachyons for its CSS. In the past, I have used bootstrap, but I wanted to try something new/different and I wanted something a little less bloated/heavy. I’m still not sure if I like it better or worse than heavy stylesheets. Like most new skills/tech, things were rough at first, but after memorizing a few class names (I still need to check this out), things started to come together with less hair-pulling. What drew me to tachyons was the fact that it is functional which tugs at my heart strings given its similarities to my day-to-day programming language of choice, R.