Definition: Set up new website/blog using popular tools and technologies

Timeline:

• Mid-May to June 2020 (6 weeks):

Decisions:

• Website generation - Experimented with Jekyll, Hugo to understand the role of static site generators - any of them met my needs and so I just picked Hugo
• Content Management - Evaluated Forestry, Github. Decided on Github, created a new personal organization to decouple from my work stuff
• Local development - After multiple attempts at only using cloud deployment, got a local setup and that made my workflow a lot easier
• Themes - experimented with many standard theme templates in Jekyll and Hugo without having good understanding of my own needs and skills needed to customize easily. Picked one based on minimal text based list view that helped me categorize my posts. Local dev workflow with Hugo helped a lot
• Domain name - Purchased a new one with Google as I didn’t want to be discoverable until ready
• Hosting - Tried Github pages, Netlify and picked Netlify. Love the auto deploy on CMS change option.

Resources

• Lot of browsing to get a basic understanding on components needed, workflows required and how to for basic customization. freecodecamp turned out to be the best resource.

Time

• 3-4 hours on 6-8 days.

Final product

• You are seeing this - Shubhar.com

Learning:

• Coding always brings up unexpected time sinks in basic things that you very well know. Specially remember a time when my css changes were not getting updated locally despite a line to line comparison with other working versions and then I realized that my file wasn’t saved. Annoying ones were the library dependencies and local environment not being the same as hosting one.
• Technologies are changing - keeping up is critical
• Side projects are very satisfying. Especially this one as it is helping me brush up on coding, set up the infrastructure to help towards my next dream/goal of becoming a public writer