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And what costume shall the poor website wear
To all tomorrow’s parties?

As I finish up in my current role, I have been supremely lucky that the last 15 years of my career have been fulfilling and engaging. I have worked with amazing people on interesting problems.

My writings and teachings have been internal - at each place I became one of the most prolific authors of internal documentation. I was sharing interesting links and opinions in Slack, HipChat and email.

All that means that this little old website got neglected. And I don’t mind that - it’s a small price to pay for the friendships I’ve built, for the software we shipped, for the customers we supported.

But now - I’m having a little hiatus, with my current role finishing up. I’m not sure if a personal website is any better nowadays than a good LinkedIn profile, but I personally will feel more comfortable knowing that this site exists and is at least halfway useful.

Hence the refresh.

Technical notes

Hugo

I love static site generators - for side projects, static sites offer huge peace of mind.

After looking at alternatives, I’ve stuck with Hugo. Great documentation, quick execution and the config is 99% self-explanatory.

I looked at Eleventy, Svelte and others - mostly they seemed to be too focused on custom JavaScript. I feel Hugo gets “out of the way” better, lets you just write.

One tip for Hugo - for themes use Git Submodule rather than the Hugo Module approach. This will put all the theme files into your working directory, making it easier for AI agents to consume.

Ananke Theme

I wanted a theme that melded simple text with big broad pictures. Our cameras and monitors are so advanced now that a throw-away photo can contain multitudes of details.

This theme gives the heading images lots of space to breath, and below the text is unadorned and allowed to speak for itself.

I explored using Blowfish, and was stunned by it’s flexibility and range of features. But it required too much custom changes for my look that I was concerned about long term maintenance. This is meant to be a simple blog!

The Ananke theme is still being actively worked upon. My main disappointment is the lack of dark mode, but it is on the roadmap, and I may try to implement it myself, God AI willing.

Cloudflare

For hosting, I am moving away from Azure Web Pages to Cloudflare. GitHub Pages, Netlify and AWS S3 were also considered, and all seemed like good options.

I’m interested in the direction Cloudflare is taking, so using it to host seems like a good way to start getting an understanding of their newer features.

For my side projects which are too complicated for a static site, I am investigating Cloudflare alongside AWS. I’m interested in exploring Durable Objects, Flagship and Workers.

DNS, analytics, comments, forms and other sundries

I’ve made minimal changes to DNS to get the refreshed site live, but otherwise untouched. I am thinking about moving my DNS name serving into Cloudflare, but as I also use this domain for my email, I need to “think twice, migrate once”.

Ideally I’d like to have DNS and domain name management in the same tool, but the .id.au TLD is only supported by a small set of Australian registrars. So for now, I am keeping domain names and DNS together.

Fin

The site is now live and running. I am really happy with how the home page looks - the hero image is a photo from a recent family holiday. It was serendipitous - we were wandering with no set plan, no fixed direction. I feel it’s one of the best photos I’ve ever taken - but credit must go to the building (EDP Headquarters in Lisbon), as the beautiful architecture made every shot a winner.

This is a simple corporate office, but it offers outstanding beauty. Corporate life need not be austere - we should strive to uplift every facet of our lives, including our work lives.

https://github.com/gohugo-ananke/ananke

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