This is the start of the forge
I’ve been wanting to create a personal site for a long time. Luckily I’ve been given some time recently to work on this. The last two years have been crazy. My wife and I had our first child in June 2019. Which means he’ll be two soon! Although, the terrible twos started a few months ago. :) We also bought our first house in October 2020. We actually caught covid the week of our closing which was interesting to say the least. With the new house there’s been lots of projects to work on! I intend on blogging about some of these projects. It’s hard for me, I have more ideas for projects then I have time for. But I think everyone knows that feeling!
I try to balance this by sticking to roughly 3-4 projects that I can bounce back and forth between. This gives me a good balance of staying interested and also focused. I’ll spend a couple months or weeks on one project and when I start to get bored of that project I’ll move onto one of the other projects. But I’ll always stay within the 3-4 projects, kind of like a rotation.
Lately my projects have been:
- Building a workbench for my garage woodshop
- Rehabilitating our lawn
- Improving skills in some video games
- And now I have this personal site to work on
You may have noticed I don’t have many technical projects although I’m a computer engineer by trade. I used to work and research things after work, but started to burn out. I find that I need the different variety to stay happy. So through my work my technical itch gets scratched but at home I get to do things with my hands.
Why Hugo and Nix theme
To start things off, I want to talk about why I’ve chosen Hugo as my static site generator and also why I’ve chosen the Nix theme from https://github.com/LordMathis. I looked at other static site generators such as Gatsby JS. I read many complaints about Gatsby JS having long build times and I have seen other blogs/personal sites using hugo. I wanted something that was simple. Hugo filled this desire.
The Nix theme from LordMathis was actually a great find! I have been roughly planning my personal site for a long time. I wanted a theme that crosses digital environments with a blacksmithing forge. I couldn’t help but make a pun on blacksmith by calling myself TheZachSmith. The icon I use for this site was actually designed in 2018 using Inkscape. I seem to have lost the svg but luckily I still have some things that will let me create a rough start to this site.
In any case the Nix theme was a great start to give me something close to the aesthetic I wanted without investing a lot of time in design. I’m not much of a designer and I wanted to get something like an MVP out there and start setting up the foundation of the site. Right now my goal for the site is to get some hands on experience with AWS. I received the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification in October 2019 but I haven’t had the chance to get a lot of hands on cloud experience. At the moment the site is hosted on as a static website on AWS S3. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it there in the long term. I’ll definitely be experiementing with different cloud services to get more experience.
What’s Next?
I am super excited to start this blog finally. Down the pipeline I will make blogs about further development on this site as well as other projects including my workbench, my lawn rehabilitation, and maybe I’ll make a blog about my current development environment which I recently finished building out. (Running an Arch VM)
Thanks for reading!