Making this Website

The first idea to make a personal website came around the middle of 2024. At the time, I had been made redundant and was struggling to find work. Despite having a couple of years of experience in the tech industry, it seemed like no one in Germany was hiring or, more likely, that I simply wasn’t qualified enough. Seeing my savings being slowly depleted and receiving rejection after rejection after rejection was very demotivating. At one point, my bank account went down to €50.35 and I had about €20 in my wallet. Luckily I have family support and generous friends so I was never in any real danger, but it was still not a nice place to be in. Eventually I decided making a simple personal website would be a good idea to show off some of the projects I’ve worked on, and it could also serve as an online CV of sorts. Whether it would help me get work or not, it would at least be something that could keep me busy and take my mind off things in a productive way.

Before making it, I decided that having a static website would probably be the easiest to maintain. Although initially I was going to code everything from scratch, I quickly realised that I could make my life much easier if I used some sort of pre-existing framework. Luckily, I remembered learning about Hugo around a year ago, so I decided to investigate it further. To manage content, I would much rather write a few markdown files than write everything in HTML, so Hugo’s mix of toml files for configuration and markdown for content seemed like a good fit. The fact that it could also have multiple languages was also a nice plus, and later down the line I do plan to add further language support.

The result is this website you’re on. It’s been an enjoyable project for myself, and I plan on periodically updating it with new posts. So if you’re interested, stay tuned!