Hello, world!

2021-05-08

I've been mulling over the question of creating my own website for quite some time now. I've done my fair share of web development, and since I'm a sucker for side projects, I've felt for some time that I should get my act together. Still, the biggest question of all remained: Which technology stack should I use?

Last year I started working on a personal site written in Ruby on Rails. I knew this framework from my time working on the website for the Student Society in Trondheim, Samfundet, which is built with Rails. I worked tirelessly for a good week before I dropped it like a hot potato, which frankly is more than I can say for some of my other side projects. The reason was due to the complexity of it all. A large web framework with all the bells and whistles. It just felt unnecessary. I wanted something simpler. To be honest, this was one of the ways I procrastinated when I wrote my master's thesis, so I didn't really have time to dive too much into it at the time, so I set it aside.

I started working full-time at Airthings the summer of 2020, after two summer internships in 2018 and 2019, as well as working part-time during my studies. Compared with university studies and my master's thesis, working full-time gives my actually a lot more free-time. So recently I've dug into the concept of a static site generator (SSG), which I've only heard about in passing before checking it more out the last few weeks. I came across a whole range of candidates, like Jekyll, but since I've been checking out Rust recently, the hunt led me to Zola. I first tried to integrate it with GitHub Pages, but I ended up using Netlify, which using the two of them has been an absolute blast.

What I like about static site generators are how easy they are to work with. After finding a static site engine in a language I liked, and a templating engine that made sense to me, I was off. I can dabble in those eternal technologies as HTML, CSS (SCSS, actually), JavaScript and Markdown. Generating the static files is super quick, deploying the site to Netlify is just as fast. Serving through HTTPS was a matter of clicking a button and waiting 24 hours. As I've said, it's been a blast to get everything up.

The question that remains is this: Will I have anything wise to say? Probably not, but I'll try to whisper something into the ether anyway and see what happens.