Welcome to my site!

Welcome to my personal site and blog! I’m going to be using this website to host both a portfolio of my work and a general blog to write about all things I write interesting. Mostly tech, but maybe I’ll expand to other stuff too.

Why Hugo?

I’ve come across Hugo a few times whilst at University - mostly my other CS student friends using it to build their own sites too. It’s relatively simple, hassle-free and doesn’t require me to reinvent the wheel for a nice looking site. Originally I thought about using one of the fancier frameworks like React or Vue which I had some experience with, but that would be overglorifying what is effectively just a blog site. I’ve also had cold feet about React in particular with regards to the recent severe vuln disclosures (which if I recall correctly could have resulted in Remote Code Execution). Equally I just wanted something running out of the box quickly and with minimal faff, which is why I didn’t do classic HTML + CSS + JS.

Why Mana Theme?

I like the colour scheme and the demo they’ve presented at Livour’s GitHub for the theme. It seemed space-themed which has always been my passion. I’ll probably switch it up in the future for a different theme, maybe something more simplistic and just black and white, but this will suffice for now.

My (not professional) takes on websites

I think it’s cool to have a website to showcase your work and write about whatever you want. What I don’t like is when people use a sledgehammer to hammer in a nail and use some incredibly heavy-weight tech stack for simple applications or static sites. That’s what I really tried to avoid doing here by using Hugo. I’m not a web dev by trade, I’ve done a few react apps here and there for personal projects in high school but it’s a bit demotivating to see people use the wrong tools for the wrong job which, whilst they can work, are hugely unnecessary.

So much of the internet (and other parts of software like games) are filled with junk. I’d call it slop but AI has already claimed that title for itself. What I mean specifically by junk is grossly unoptimised code that makes the web-surfing experience 10x more annoying. I’m not expecting quant-dev-level optimisation of basic web JS by any means, but I also don’t like it when loading a website takes long just for those ‘pretty’ (distracting) animations to make the website seem a little more lively. Moreso, devs who prioritise that stuff tend to also overlook accessibility settings and screen-readers end up with complete gibberish.

Rant over

Thanks for reading my first blog post, sorry for the rant, see you in the next post(s) hopefully!