Technical Debt Cleanup, Again
Several years had passed since I last touched my portal site. It was the classic developer situation: “Oh right, I haven’t maintained that site at all.” I needed a place to publish side project tools and libraries anyway, so I finally got around to tackling the renewal.
Why Hugo (Again)?
I was already familiar with Hugo as a Go-based static site generator. While there are tons of options like Jekyll, Gatsby, Next.js (SSG), Hugo ultimately wins on build speed and template simplicity. Nothing beats the smooth experience of writing with hugo server and live reload.
Actually, I had the migration setup ready years ago, but I caught that classic “I’ll do it someday” syndrome. You know the feeling—every engineer has been there.
Breaking Up with WordPress, the Technical Debt
The legacy WordPress site was literally “living technical debt.” Every login greeted me with a storm of “Please update your plugins.” Security patches, PHP version dependencies, MySQL babysitting… enough already!
From a developer perspective, the git add . → git commit → git push workflow is infinitely more natural. The agility of writing in Markdown and deploying to GitHub Pages or Netlify—once you taste it, there’s no going back. Diff management, branching strategies, everything just works. This is Infrastructure as Code in its purest form.
Theme Selection: The Rabbit Hole
Choosing a Hugo theme consumed as much time as picking npm packages. Academic, Hermit, Terminal… all tempting, but I finally settled on PaperMod for its polished design and performance.
Taking an agile approach of “better done than perfect,” I postponed customization. Think MVP, but MVS (Minimum Viable Site).
Implementation Phase: Preparation is 80%
Thanks to all that agonizing over technology selection and requirements definition, the actual coding took just a few hours. Content migration, config file adjustments, minor CSS customization. The design phase really is everything.
Post-Migration Thoughts: Static Site Victory
The liberation from WordPress exceeded expectations. No worrying about server resources, blazing fast CDN delivery (eventually), excellent SEO. But most importantly, the developer experience (DX) is night and day.
Anyway, completing this long-overdue site migration feels great. With a simple, lightweight, and developer-friendly environment in place, I’m determined not to slack off this time and actually create some content.