Site Details

For those of you who might be interested in the thinking, technical and otherwise, behind this site.

Content

I was attempting to solve two problems with this site.

The first was that I needed a way to quickly refresh my knowledge on topics that, through disuse, were just out of mind’s reach. Of course I can just Google such things or use the new kid on the block, ChatGPT, but I find that building up my own little documentation network helps me understand things more deeply and that allows for faster refresh cycles.

The second was to establish an online professional presence. Over the next few years, I plan to move from full-time employment towards consulting/coaching/fractional CTO type work and this site will be one of the foundations of that transition.

Technology

I have kept the technology behind the site as simple as possible. If I can build it with pure HTML and CSS I will. I lean towards handcrafting the code, avoiding frameworks that obfuscate what is really going on. There are faster ways to get a web site up and running, but I had the secondary goal of using this effort to refresh my knoweledge of web technologies.

There is no JavaScript, at least for now. But, I am pragmatic and there may come a day that JavaScript is required. If that days arrives, you can be ensured that the JavaScript will be minimal.

I’m no designer (I’m sure that you already figured that out), but I do care about user experience and I have attempted to make the site usable and functional. There are few images. You will find the occasional diagram explaining technical designs or concepts, but no images enhancing the feel of the site. This keeps the focus on the content and saves some bandwidth.

I fully expect that 99.9% of traffic to this site will be from myself with a spattering from potential clients and maybe some random Internet traffic. The simplistic nature of the site works for my current needs. I imagine the design will improve over time (maybe), but the focus will remain on the content and keeping things simple.

There are no cookies. At this stage, I don’t see the need for any tracking. This helps keeps things simple from a privacy perspective. There may come a day where cookies are useful to support site functionality, I will worry about that then.

Specifics

The site is generated using Hugo. Absolutely no complaints with Hugo, it’s amazing.

The site is deployed using Netlify. They make it ridiculously easy to deploy a site. And, for the volume of traffic that I generate it is free (including SSL and being able to use a custom domain that is hosted elsewhere). I keep thinking there must be a catch, but I have not seen it yet (no, I do not get a referral fee if you use them).

The source is hosted on GitHub. GitHub is great and they provide an incredible service to the open source community.

I develop on MacOS using the standard set of Unix-style tools and Vim (now Neovim) is my preferred editor.

And, that’s about it. Keeping the tech simple allows me to focus on and servicing clients and building software.