Why

I’ve been wanting to do this for such a long time. Recently I had the synchronicity of multiple sources¹ reminding me to start blogging or journaling. I see the importance for documenting your own path for reflection, self improvement and the chance for others to learn.

What

As an engineer I would like to share my learnings with my future self So that I can reflect on my journey and improve my workflow for the next journey.

It needs to be public <www.johannesprinz.com> to force a certain level of quality by social pressure.

How

Choose a blog engine

There are so many to choose from. A quick google gave me the following to look at:

• Ghost Heard about these a few years ago when I first thought about blogging. This was my first intro to containers then too as they had a development container to launch from.
• Wordpress This comes up under almost any related “build a website” search.
• Jekyll Written in Ruby.
• Hugo

I have settled with Hugo, as I am a fan of markdown for authoring and it had easy quick-start guides in all areas I have either familiarity in or wish to learn more about.

Setup authoring environment

I work with a lot of frameworks and languages in my daily engineering workflow. Keep my main machine as clean as possible is very important to me. What I have found to keep the global scope of my machine clean and free of tooling and framework clutter is container based development. For this I use Docker, Visual Studio Code and the Remote development container extension. As it turns out hugo has a development container.

1. Follow the [Remote development in Containers](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers-tutorial tutorial to get setup.

2. Setup your workspace and launch VS Code

   mkdir blog
   cd blog
   git init
   code .
   

3. Once VisualStudio Code launches setup hugo development container

   • Open Command Pallet CTRL + p

     

     

     

     

4. From here you can follow the Hugo quick start guide post the install step.

Setup pipelines

Now that I can create content I need to enable publishing. I tried publishing to Github pages. I followed this video Creating a Blog with Hugo and Github in 10 minutes.

⚠️ For this to work I needed to name my published repo by the same name as the github page url “https://[UserName].github.io”.

But then I found this Tutorial to Publish a Hugo site to Azure Static Web Apps Preview. This setup a static site publishing git hub actions workflow with preview environments within the Pull Request process. Playing with a few GitHub repository settings to secure my main branch I was all set.

Drafting the first post

At this stage I though I’d nailed it. If someone asked me “When will the first post be published?”, I would of replied “Tomorrow”. Finding the topic for this one was easy. And here are all the challenges I stumbled across writing my first post.

• Spell checking.
  • Do this via a VS Code extension
• Finding the right theme
• Learning Hugo Hugo introduction
  • Syntax highlighting
    • Using Hugo short codes
  • Rendering of html tags like <kbd>home</kbd>
    • Using Hugo short codes
  • Styling and customising themes

All this ended up taking another few weeks to resolve to a point where I felt it was good enough to publish.

What I learned

• Hugo
  • Intro
• git submodules
• GitHub Pages
• GitHub Actions
• Azure static website service