dancs.dev

Introduction

With technology and artificial intelligence continuing to evolve at a rate reminiscent of Moore’s law, I found myself interested in creating my own website to showcase my projects as a software engineer and share my experience in the world of homelabbing.

After a lot of contemplation, I chose to build dancs.dev using Hugo, an open-source static site generator written in Go. I was drawn to Hugo for several reasons - the ability to write content using Markdown, its speed and performance, and the maintainability of hosting a static site.

Technology stack

The beauty of Hugo is its simplicity and maintainability. While more complicated frameworks like Django and Next.js certainly have their place - and indeed I have used them fairly extensively for both professional and personal projects - for a personal website, I wanted something that is lightweight and easy to maintain. After all, there’s a Dan Simmons quote that describes complicated software projects.

• Hugo: Static site generator.
• Markdown: For content creation.
• CSS/JavaScript: Styling and additional functionality.
• NGINX: Serving the site.

Design

The core idea behind this site is that it should be simple, lightweight, and flexible. While there are many fantastic themes available for Hugo, I opted to create my own custom theme, Ikigai, which is available on my GitHub. This was primarily because I wanted to be able to tailor the design exactly to my liking and add features that might not be present in existing themes.

Another core idea in the making of this site is that it should still be completely functional without the user having to enable JavaScript. While some functionality is enhanced with JavaScript enabled, such as the copy button of code snippets, the site remains fully usable and accessible even if JavaScript is disabled.

Future work

The site is currently in the early stages of development, and I plan to add more features and improve the appearance over time.