Hello Simplicity - Hello Hugo
It was about a year ago now that I was staring at my old website (using the wildly popular Al-Folio template running on Jekyll). I had found the template a bit overbearing, so I had slimmed down a fork of the theme. It worked great for being hosted via Github Pages. But I now wanted to update some things, change some styles, and push some new content.
As I was digging in, I hit build errors. Things had fallen out of date and because I had made some major changes in my fork, it was not going to be easy to pull down the upstream updates. Did I really want this thing to work that badly? Was there any other way forward?
Being someone who adamantly pushes back against sunk cost fallacy, I took a step back. This template, while powerful, was experiencing some wild scope creep. And other variants like it were all doing so much complexity for what was really just a basic portfolio website. Thankfully in my hunt for simple, I came across Barks, a Hugo template. This was almost barebones basic, but I loved it. So here it was decided, rather than fight this thing I had to make the old stuff work, I was going to rebuild from scratch. And it worked out wonderfully.
My website now runs on Hugo, still hosted on Github pages. While the architecture took a bit of experimentation and trial and error to really wrap my head around, it is now proving very easy to use and flexible for my needs. There is no over the top complexity or scope creep. Just good old static site serving. And I couldn't be happier with the change of pace.
Today as I write this I have pushed a major update to the site from those days a year back where I made the switch. I now have a somewhat interactive portfolio, which I think does a much better job of showcasing my background and experiences than my prior site did via links alone.
Show, don't tell, right? Well thanks Hugo and Barks for making it easy and simple to do exactly that. It may not be the flashiest site, but I'm very pleased with it's simplicity. That is a (in my opinion) timeless aesthetic.