Welcome to my new blog

So this is my new blog. Minimalistic, unimpressive, static. Built with Hugo, themed with the help of Claude Code, and created on a rainy saturday afternoon. Empty like a blank sheet of paper, but that will change soon.
Why does this blog exist?
This blog will mostly be used to showcase my current development projects, document my journey through the tech world, rant about tech stuff and whatever I come up with to post about IT, DevOps, Linux, AI, maybe Blockchain (Is this still relevant outside of cryptocurrencies? I didn’t hear anything about blockchains for a long time), Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Gadgets.
This blog will also accompany my business activities and my thoughts about everything business-related. Maybe I will also get a bit political, I’m not sure yet.
I’m planning to create a second blog about my hobbies and interests outside of Tech and IT soon. But for now this blog will make it.
Why now?
I had a lot of ideal points in my life to start a blog. When I started my apprenticeship to a Computer Science Expert back in September 2015, when I started my self-employment in March 2023 with my own Typo3 template and later on with my SaaS entrance control system (they’re both offline now but the source code is available on my GitLab). I could’ve created this blog in March 2022, when I created a a small stupid game where users could post a sentence every day and the most posted word was added to a sentence creating a democratic form of One-Word Story. Mostly the users posted the F-word anyway. Nontheless I advertised this game on Twitter and reached up to 200 unique users pretty fast. I even had a little chat with someone from South America.
Or I could’ve created this blog back in 2020, when there was this one world changing event (you know what I’m talking about).
I’m not sure why I didn’t create a blog in the past. Probably I thought that my doing wasn’t interesting enough to be written down and posted. Probably I wasn’t motivated enough to present my achievements to other people in order to stay in the background. But this changes with this blog.
Together with the creation of this blog I plan to move from the small town of Bassum near Bremen to Berlin to find a new anchor point in my life. Or really to find an anchor point in the first place. And to find the right people to finally start a startup for a Linux ecosystem which is already in the planning for years.
Why Hugo?
Usually I’m a Typo3 and Symfony developer with 10+ years business experience. So it would make sense to create this blog in Typo3 (or to create a custom Mini CMS for this blog in Symfony for the sake of it). Or I could install WordPress in no time, select a ready made template and post ahead. But there are two Reasons why I chose Hugo for this blog:
- My desire to learn about new technologies like new CMS systems and so on.
- While it is possible with extensions like StaticFileCache or WP Rocket or cache servers like Vinyl Cache (formerly Varnish Cache) to improve the speed of that blog, a CMS system is too heavy and in the long run too expensive for a simple static blog (you need to execute PHP code after all). With a static site generator like Hugo you just have to deliver the static pages.
Epilogue
I’m thrilled to start posting soon. At the meantime you can check me out on LinkedIn. I’m happy to hear from you there.
Oli out.