Introduction
As you can see, there have been some (drastic?) changes to this site. It is much faster, the design is sleeker, and it looks like a completely different site. I can’t take credit for any of that. Except for the tiny green lowercase a favicon on top.
My previous site was built with django, and I was running into some performance issues, I was about to look into caching mechanisms, and optimizing sql queries (requesting the front page resulted in 28 sql queries, tf?!). I’m sure I was doing something wrong, so I’m partly to blame. I finally decided to bite the bullet and use a static site generator.
Why Django?
Django was the first web framework I learnt and I wanted to use it in the real world. While using Django for a blog was overkill, my naivete blinded me to that. I am a sucker for anything that with the adjectives - “powerful”, “industry-standard”, and “production-ready”.
What did I learn?
Building my first site in django wasn’t a complete waste.
- I got a good feel for how django works.
- I learnt how to set up nginx and gunicorn (it’s a huge pain!).
- I used docker for production, and got a feel for how environment variables work.
Ultimately the most important lesson I learnt was, the right tool for the job.
With great power comes a great demand for resources.
All powerful things come at a cost. That cost can be directly translated into money spent or developer time spent(in my case: wasted) on optimizing things like sql queries! I was so caught up in “keeping my options” open that I didn’t even pause to consider that I would never need most of those “options”. As the saying goes, if you don’t think you’re going to need it, YAGNI (Ya ain’t gonna need it).
Why Hugo?
This is one of those decisions that I made at the spur of a moment. A friend of mine moved his blog from jekyll to Hugo and I thought let’s give hugo a try. It worked, I faced almost no difficulties in getting started and I managed to revamp the website in a day (most of the time was spent picking a theme) I finally settled on the PaperMod Theme. It’s very well documented. Go check it out!
I hope you enjoy the new look. Cheers!