After four years of running NextJS as my primary blog and development framework, I am making the hop to Hugo. For some time it has been on my mind to minimize my personal site, and while Next has served me very well, I have spent a lot of time around the smolweb and alternative protocols such as Gemini and Gopher that have swayed me to looking into creating smaller apps that just work well.
Don’t be part of the bloat problem #
There is unquestionable bloat in the modern web, and I don’t want to be more of the problem. In my work, I don’t even build with Javascript anymore - using technologies such as HTMX and Go’s Templ, there is really no need for the JS bloat that so many throw into their projects for no reason other than they don’t know there is another way. Installing thousands of npm dependencies to get a Hello World page makes little sense to me.
If you really need Javascript, there are tiny frameworks such as alpineJS to round out your apps.
So, in effort to be the change that I wish to see in the world, I am beginning today by using Hugo.
Smaller by 20x #
My site looks quite different if you’ve been around these parts before, and the interesting part is that even though I have more content on the site than ever before, it is about 20 times smaller than the NextJS version. Not only this, the deploy script I use pushes the blog in no time at all for rapid development and updating.
Killing a few birds with one stone here, and I am not looking back.
Thank you to Nuno Coração and his fantastic Blowfish template for getting me off the ground and running in no time at all!