Hugo

One of my 2025 resolutions is doing things that don’t scale and doing them faster without overthinking. The idea is to focus on doing more while worrying less about scalability and sustainability in the things I do outside of work. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking for a while about tracking some of my out-of-band activities on this blog. The goal is to:

• List the things I do, books and articles I read, and talks I grok.
• Add some commentary or quote something I liked from the content, verbatim, for posterity.
• Not spam people who just want to read the regular articles.
• Not turn into a content junkie, churning out slop I wouldn’t want to read myself.

This isn’t about getting more eyeballs on what I publish. It’s about tracking what I do so I can look back at the end of the year and enjoy a nice little lull of accomplishment. Plus, having a place to post stuff regularly nudges me to read more, explore more, and do more of the things I actually want to do.

When I started writing here about five years ago, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t give in to the trend of starting a blog, adding one overly enthusiastic entry about the stack behind it, and then vanishing into the ether.

I was somewhat successful at that and wanted to write something I can link to when people are curious about the machinery that drives this site. The good thing is that the tech stack is simple and has remained stable over the years since I’ve only made changes when absolutely necessary.

This site is built with Hugo and served via GitHub Pages. Recently, I decided to change the font here to make things more consistent across different devices. However, I didn’t want to go with Google Fonts for a few reasons:

• CDN is another dependency.
• Hosting static assets on GitHub Pages has served me well.
• Google Fonts tracks users and violates GDPR in Germany. Google Analytics does that too. But since I’m using the latter anyway, this might come off a bit apocryphal.
• I wanted to get a few extra Lighthouse points.

Turns out, it’s pretty easy to host the fonts yourself.