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Comment by DJHenk | Hacker News Reader

A personal blog should be whatever the author wants it to be of course, and a developer should play with whatever technology he/she wants. But as a backend developer, I don't want any Javascript on my site, because I hate writing it and I don't like browsing it.

These statements indicate to me that this "ideal tech stack" is rather personal to the author:

> I want to build the site in React and TypeScript

> I don't want limitations on what my personal website can be/become. Sure, my current site consists of two simple, static blog posts. But down the road, I may want to...

> I literally have zero memory of how we used to build forms in the pre-React times.

I think I'll keep it at Hugo for now, with just HTML and CSS.

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Came here to say Hugo is the correct answer for a Personal Developer blog, unless you're using it to showcase your skills in a particular technology, at least in my experience.

Finally dived into Hugo and it's just so easy to get going with making Markdown content and turning it into a static site with one of the themes from their gallery. There's a bit of a rabbit hole to go down if you want to get more custom than that, but it's extremely customizable and you can learn a lot about how to do so just looking at the source code from themes in the gallery.

The only tech I really have to worry about is HTML, CSS, Markdown, and a little bit of template scripting for ranges and reading variables from the config files, if I want to customize the theme.

I've gotten excited about building my personal website again because I don't have to screw around with the technology hardly at all, I can focus on just making content. Which is what you want for a personal site. You don't want a bunch of friction slowing you down from actually getting content out there.

I don't have to worry about dependency hell with Hugo either, it's just an executable.

How do you host your site?

I've been using Github Pages which has Jekyll support and that's worked fine, but I'm curious where people host their Hugo sites (or how hosting works when you run the server yourself).

Is it AWS? Dreamhost? or something else? Do you have to manage a proxy or handle load/cost spikes? Can a surge of traffic take down the site?

I haven't read a ton about this, but I'm curious about it. It'd be neat to have full control over my own publishing if something ever happened to github pages.

That's the beauty of a static site generator -- github just expects valid HMTL to be generated and pushed to a specific branch. Github has no more Jekyll support than it has support for Hugo or a custom static site generator written in bash.

I host my hugo-based blog with github pages.

Ah ok - I think I understand.

Github does have special Jekyll support, but you just generate the hugo static files locally and only push those up to where Github expects them to be?

I think with Jekyll Github will re-generate the static files for you and works with the RSS plugin automatically.

Good to know though - might be worth checking out Hugo, thanks!

Huh, I didn't know that Github had that sort of integration. I'm surprised that they're willing to run arbitrary ruby like that.

I haven't actually made it live yet, but it's just a static site once it's generated. I'll either push it to my github pages (probably what I'll do), or I'll upload it to my webhost, which I also have (but has been dormant for awhile).

The ideal tech stack for a personal blog is whatever the person wants to maintain, update, and, most importantly, use.

Hugo is awesome! (Apart from the Go templates, before you get the hang of them..)

A year or two back, shouting REACT at everything and everyone could actually land you a new job, but now... I'd just stick to Hugo and focus on my content if I wanted to impress any recruiters.

Hugo is great but check out Zola, it is basically like Hugo but with better templates IMO.

the built in image processing is kind of a big deal for Zola that's handy. a cut above all node based pipelines that have horrible native modules for that. I kinda just want to write Vue components for posts rather than markdown so turn between trying Zola it nuxts new content cms

As a full-stack developer who spends a good proportion of my time at my day-job working with React, I totally agree. My personal website is Hugo, and entirely JavaScript free.

Same here, even a lot of my personal projects are now just SPA free by default. I do use Node on the backend, but most of the time, a templating language like pug gives me everything I need.

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