2020 has been a strange year, and the COVID pandemic left me with time on my hands due to having no commute time and because I work for a phenomenal company that provides me with a comfortable work/life balance even amid great uncertainty.

So I started thinking a bit about my personal website and how it’s been neglected and oftentimes unavailable through the years. It’s time to fix that. I’ve focused on a few areas that I feel a personal website is most valuable to me:

  • Hosting my resume. I keep this current even though I’m rarely looking for a job.
  • Hosting my MeetUp/conference materials. This will come in handy again post-pandemic when I am (hopefully) speaking routinely.
  • Writing. One of my future goals is to start writing. It’s something I’ve never really been great at, and I think it’s a positive challenge for me. My writing can be hosted here.

So, using Hugo.io, I built out the basic premise of the site. This great theme is a modified version of Panr’s Terminal theme. I set up some basic deployment routines using GitHub Actions and have this Azure space to serve files, and so far, two nights into it, things are looking great. Getting to know Hugo has also been beneficial because it’s my first opportunity to learn the Go language.

And there we have it: a personal website. Nothing fancy, just the basics, like it used to be when I was doing the same thing in high school circa 1996. Static files. Focus. And a love of sharing with the world.