Starting with a “Hello, World!” has been a long standing tradition in the software world, and this is my first post honoring this tradition.

Finally, Creating Content

I have been obsessing over my personal website for a long time; I wanted to build it from scratch, so I learned a few frontend frameworks, manipulated many templates, and wrote whole lot of css/html trying to achieve the prefect look. I finally decided to stop worrying about the UI and to start creating content which is my main objective. I stumbled on this Hugo theme a while back, and I really liked its minimalist approach with its toggle between dark and light mode.

Netlify and Hugo to the Rescue

I worked on learning Hugo, the static site generator behind this blog, a while ago. Hugo does make it very easy to have a live site in matter of minutes. AWS, Amazon Web Services, was my primary choice to host my site. A CloudFront distribution along with S3 bucket, an SSL certificate, and a couple DNS records will do the job; it’s also really cheap. While this stack is optimal and cheap, I wanted to keep my workload at minimal since I have couple production servers I administrate already. Also, CloudFront doesn’t redirect to index.html by default such as done by S3 with the proper configuration, read more. Though, I still use AWS Lambda for the contact form on this site. Netlify is free, handles most of the work under the hood, and simplifies the build and deployment.

Pay it Forward

I learned a lot from the internet, and it was always my intention to pay it forward. I hope to be able to help others through the content I create here. I’m committed to a no ads policy along with my best efforts to minimize any user information collected by third-parties integrations on this blog; I don’t collect any info myself other than minimal contact info if you choose to contact me. Wish me good luck on this journey.

Know more about me or contact me to wish me luck or provide much appreciated suggestions.