There’s no shortage of tools.
But the ones you actually keep say more about you than you think.
I build this site in Hugo. It renders in milliseconds, even on old hardware. No backend. No runtime dependencies. Just files.
It gets deployed to Fastmail over WebDAV, a protocol older than most of the people who try to tell you everything needs to be real-time, reactive, or serverless.
It’s not flashy. It works. And I understand every step in the chain.
That’s what matters.
You Make Trade-offs. Whether You Admit It or Not.
Every stack reflects your limits:
- What you can maintain on no sleep
- What you can troubleshoot without opening fourteen tabs
- What you trust when everything else is breaking
I don’t run Hugo because it’s trendy. I run it because when something goes wrong, I can fix it. I run it because I can publish a post from the command line in under a minute.
And I chose WebDAV not because it’s elegant, but because it’s simple. No CI pipeline. No half-broken webhook chain. Just an upload.
The System That Survives Is the One You Can Still Operate
This isn’t about minimalism. It’s about failure tolerance.
- I know where my site lives
- I know how to rebuild it offline
- I know how to recover it if something corrupts
And that’s more important than which static site generator is popular this year.
Because when you’re building infrastructure around newborn sleep cycles, or in the middle of a job hunt, or while barely keeping your head above water, clarity beats clever.
Every Tool You Keep Is a Version of You
Look at someone’s toolchain closely enough and you’ll see the shape of their days.
Mine is made of plain text, bash scripts, and protocols nobody’s updated in a decade. Not because I’m stuck in the past, but because it still works, and I’ve got enough broken systems to deal with.
It’s not impressive. But it’s honest.
And right now, I’ll take that.