Building a Portfolio & Dev Blog
Software engineers benefit from personal portfolios and blogs to showcase their technical decisions, project architecture, and domain knowledge.
A resume provides a brief overview of past roles. A dedicated technical website allows engineers to document system designs, share technical lessons, and demonstrate engineering standards.
Technical Requirements
When planning a personal website, the goal is to balance low maintenance overhead with fast page load performance.
Site Generation Frameworks
- Hugo: Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It compiles markdown files into HTML rapidly. Hugo requires zero server-side application logic and delivers strong security and speed.
- Next.js: A React framework offering static site generation and server-side rendering. Next.js provides flexibility for complex interactive user interfaces, but introduces higher maintenance overhead for simple content sites.
- Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for custom layout styling.
Hugo was selected for this website due to its rapid build speed, low overhead, and simple deployment path. The PaperMod theme provides a minimal design with built-in dark mode support, search indexing, and syntax highlighting.
Deployment Architecture
Static sites eliminate backend server management and database maintenance.
- Cloudflare Pages: Cloudflare Pages hosts static assets on a global edge network. It integrates directly with GitHub repositories to trigger automatic builds upon code pushes.
- GitHub Pages: An alternative static hosting platform with repository integration.
Cloudflare Pages provides automated deployment previews for pull requests, automated SSL certificate generation, and global caching.
Conclusion
Using static site generators like Hugo combined with edge hosting via Cloudflare Pages provides a performant, low-friction platform for technical writing and architectural documentation.