Enterprise loves to brag about zero-downtime.
Blue/green deploys, rolling updates, canary releases.
Most of us are just trying not to nuke the family photo gallery during a rebuild.
But even in a small stack, you can design for continuity.
Static site generators promise simplicity: write markdown, build, publish.
Reality: you’ll eventually push a broken build at midnight and wonder why nothing works.
Hugo is fast and clean. But self-hosting it means thinking past the happy path.
Big tech loves incident post-mortems. They come with slide decks, timelines, action items, and a dozen people pointing fingers.
For a one-person ops shop, that’s overkill. But you still need to learn from failure.
Documentation has a bad reputation: either sprawling enterprise wikis no one reads or nothing at all.
For a solo operator, you don’t need a thousand pages. You need a map you can still read when you’ve forgotten the terrain.
Old projects pile up.
Half-finished Hugo sites, dead scripts, configs for services you no longer run.
Left unchecked, they clutter your mono-repo or backup until you can’t tell what’s live and what’s archaeological.
Continuous Integration and Deployment sounds like enterprise overhead.
For a solo static site, it doesn’t have to be.
You just need a repeatable, low-friction way to publish changes without breaking the stack.
Secrets are the most fragile part of any stack.
Lose one, and the whole system can fall apart.
But solo-ops often handle them casually: keys hard-coded into configs, passwords in plain text.
Keeping everything in one repository sounds clean: one repo to clone, one place to back up.
In practice, mono-repos become junk drawers fast.
If you’re running a small stack — Hugo site, config files, automation scripts — a single repo is fine, but only if you design for it.
Git isn’t just for developers.
It’s a time machine for anything that can be written down.
When you self-host or build systems solo, half the job is remembering what changed and why.
Without history, you’re debugging blind.
Everyone loves the promise of “no-ops.”
Push to a repo, watch the pipeline do the work, let someone else worry about uptime.
But for this site, I kept it simple: Hugo on my own machine, published via WebDAV to Fastmail.
Not because I hate convenience. Because I don’t trust it.
