The stack
The site runs on Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. Something you’ve probably heard of before. I went with it because it’s fast, simple, and I’m learning Go anyway so I figured I’d stay in that ecosystem.
The theme is risotto simply because its clean, text-forward, no distractions. Exactly what I wanted.
For hosting I’m using Cloudflare Pages. The CI/CD is just: push to main and Cloudflare builds. Why? Mostly because theres no servers to babysit. For someone who does that for a living during the day, it’s nice to just keep it simple stupid.
AI did most of the heavy lifting
To be honest, I used AI (Claude) to build most of this. The Hugo config, the project structure, getting the theme wired up, the deployment setup. I described what I wanted and worked through it conversationally. I’m not a frontend developer and I didn’t want to spend hours reading Hugo docs for what’s ultimately a simple static site.
That said, I’m not trying to hand everything off to AI and call it a day. I’m using this site as a way to actually learn web development and CSS on my own terms. The AI helped me get the scaffolding up fast so I could focus on understanding the pieces rather than fighting with boilerplate.
More importantly, I want to just keep writing more. Writing in public is a pretty cool way to learn.
What’s next
Eventually I want to move away from Hugo and host this myself, probably a Go server that serves the content directly. I want to understand the full stack, from the server to the HTML. But that’s a project for when I have more time. For now, this gets the job done: I have somewhere to write, it deploys itself, and I can iterate on it whenever I get a chance.
The whole point was to stop waiting for the perfect setup and just start writing. So here we are.
