As tradition requires it, this post will do a tour of how this blog is built but also about the rationale behind the blog itself. As a blog owner I cheated because this is in fact not my first post but who cares ?

So without further ado, let's get started !

Why ?

The reason is pretty simple, I always liked to share knowledge with others. Mostly via conferences and some articles posted on my previous companies blogs.

But multiple factors made me reduce this activity:

• I changed job and I don't have the same amount of time to dedicate to this
• I also became a dad thus I have less time out of work to prepare for such events

So If I have less time, and I still want to share knowledge, what can I do ?

• I am not very active on social media (twitter and mastodon), I am more there to look for knowledge. Also, I am not very comfortable with the threads format, and I don't want to be limited by the number of characters.
• I don't have the competency nor the time to work on video contents. I used to stream on Twitch, and may come back to this in the future, but It's too time-consuming for me.

So it leaves me with writing blog posts. Even though a lot is already available on the internet, I feel that writing contents for myself can help my future self and maybe others ? After 10 years in the IT industry working in multiple domains (consulting, gambling, health startup), I want to share tips, I want to share my experience, I want to share my knowledge and this on multiple subjects: technical and organizational ones.

My current company don't really have a company blog (for now) and I want to keep something for me. My previous blog posts are still available, but It is a bit sad that I somehow never really had ownership on those. So let's change that, and build my own blog ! I already have a lot of content In my mind that I want to share.

How ?

I wanted to build something simple, something that I can easily maintain and host. That's why I decided to use a static site generator.

Static site generator

A static site generator is a tool that takes a bunch of files and generate a static website out of them. So nothing too complex on my side, I can just write content and don't have to bother about what's around it. I preferably wanted to use a static site generator that uses markdown files, I use markdown a lot in my daily life, and I am very comfortable with it. Like this our blog is a stateless website that serve HTML files, like in the good old days.

No JS ! No CSS ! No HTML ! No Database ! Just markdown files !

Zola

Zola is a static site generator, it's comparable with Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, etc... It's based on CommonMark a specification for Markdown.

One of the main reason I chose to use Zola instead of the competition is that it's an OSS project written in Rust, with an active community. I am a Rust enthusiast, I've used the language in the past (not during my day jobs) and I really like it. Having my site generator written in Rust will allow me to contribute to it if I need to.

To use Zola you only need a static binary, no need to install a runtime like NodeJS or Ruby. Also, I am not good in all the design things (👋CSS), and Zola has a lot of themes available for free.

This was enough to convince me.

Hosting

One of the first thing that I thought was that I am not sure how much time I will be able to dedicate to this blog. My family is my priority and I also maintain an open source project that takes some time. I plan to feed this blog when the occasions arise. For now, I don't want to invest money if I am not active enough here, So finding something free was one of the criteria.

Github pages

I chose to use GitHub pages to host this blog. It is a free hosting solution for static websites, it's very simple to use and has a lot of features.

Why did I choose GitHub pages ?

• I am already familiar with GitHub and it's ecosystem. That's where my OSS projects are versioned.
• I also used GitHub actions in the past, and I am very comfortable with them.
• It's free

Conclusion

Now you know almost everything behind the technical choices I made. Piping Zola and GitHub pages together is very simple and documented in Zola. You can check the source code of this blog here and the CI/CD pipeline here

Hope you will enjoy reading my future posts, and don't hesitate to comment on them !

Flo.