Personal website v2 (2026)

Three years ago, I turned a portfolio I created for a job at Microsoft into this website.

While a few people are pushing the theory of a dead internet (which is now being amplified by the use of agentic AI) there has been a real resurgence of blogs and personal websites. Especially by people working in the tech industry since the If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs and Expert Twitter’ Only Goes So Far. Bring Back Blogs articles both published at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In 2022, The Verge decided to jump on the bandwagon: “Twitter is creaking. Social media seems less fun than ever. Maybe it’s time to get a little more personal”.

Static site generators like Hugo, and Gatsby (amongst others) combined with GitHub Pages or Netlify have made it easier for enthusiasts to create a blog they own, without having to host WordPress on a web server or to pay a monthly subscription. Just pick a generator, a theme, a domain name if you have one, and you’re all set.

While the documentation is not always user-friendly (Why Hugo’s Documentation Sucks), it has definitely improved and good themes are abstracting much of the weird intricacies you’ll encounter but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

For the v1 of this website, I picked Hugo and the Wowchemy Resume theme (now HugoBlox). I struggled a lot at first to understand the concept of Go modules and how you could edit the theme with partials.

The theme documentation wasn’t great at that time and the Hugo documentation was even worse. I made it work by reading a lot of blogs (!) and looking for people who already tweaked their theme on GitHub. The theme update process wasn’t straightforward (although optional) and the frequent changes of the project owner to Wowchemy and then HugoBlox didn’t help.

With a lot more free time on my end following the end of my employment at Ticketmaster, it was time for me to update it to the latest version of Hugo and to a new, much simpler, theme. I chose Neso which is based on one of the most popular Hugo themes available: papermod.

The set-up was fairly straightforward and the Neso documentation was quite good. My free and legacy Netlify plan only allowed me to link my domain name to 1 project, so I decided to delete the previous one while keeping the code in a private repository. A CNAME change later on my domain and I was live!

I had a lot of fun creating the logo and associated favicons. I used favicon.io to find a great font - Workbench - based on the Commodore 64 and Amiga fonts, downloaded it from Google Fonts and then used Figma to create the logo in an SVG format. Once you have the SVG, it’s easy to generate the different favicons sizes you need for your website with tools like RealFaviconsGenerator.

If you were wondering if now is a good time to create yours, do it! The next thing I have to do on my end is to write, one letter, one word, one post at a time.