2021

I cannot believe we are in February already. 2020 was a clusterf*** of a year – COVID, forced isolation, millions sick, hundreds of thousands dead, a nerve-wracking election, and the aftermath that would not end. January felt like a continuation of December'20 to some extent. But thankfully, things are looking a little better. Vaccines are out, we have a government made of adults, and things are looking up.

I’m starting the year with an upgrade to the website. You’ll notice a new theme and some splashes of color – they’re nice, but the key upgrade is below the hood. I’ve moved off Jekyll to Hugo. I don’t love Ruby; I don’t love how Jekyll has tons of ugly _s everywhere; I’m not fond of managing dependencies. Built using Go, Hugo is clean and fast. Structure and templates make sense. The community has ported most of the Jekyll templates over. I’m still using GitHub Pages to host (free and straightforward) but moved the site generation over to Hugo.

Enough about SSGs. Though the world of SSGs is fascinating and worth a peek. Why have fancy database-driven websites (I’m looking at you, WordPress) when a simple statically generated site could suffice? And the interwebs are very good at pushing bits of text around – no fancy database lookups, and everything works blazingly fast.

I care about writing, and this upgrade will let me write more. My goal is to write shorter posts more often. I hope you, dear reader, enjoy them.

Here’s to a great 2021 and a giant f-you to 2020.