Why and How I Built This Website
Hello and welcome! You probably found this website from my LinkedIn or other social media profiles.
Why eson.dev?
For years, I have always wanted to own a personal website. Back when I was living in Singapore, I even reserved the hostname eson.sg for many years without hosting anything 😅. I was still building up my career and LinkedIn is the best place to display my skills and experience.
In 2019, I found that .dev has become a top-level domain, as announced by Google. A quick search showed that eson.dev is still available and I purchased the domain in no time. I wanted to use it as an alternative to my LinkedIn profile and give it a more personal touch, to showcase my experience and game projects, and maybe write some articles to share some tips and tricks.
Deciding the tech to use
After owning the domain name, it was time to decide on the technology to build the site on. A long time ago, I learnt website building with just HTML and JavaScript using Microsoft FrontPage (it was also a period when Flash was prominent) 😂. Of course, we are living in 2020 now and there are so many ways to create your own website without even writing a single line of HTML.
I tried out with the GitHub’s own personal-website project. It uses Jekyll as the site generator. For some reasons, I didn’t really like Jekyll. Soon after that I discovered Hugo as an alternative (it’s also written in Go and I use Go every day at work) and decided to give it a try, and it fits my needs. While searching for a theme on Hugo, I found Academic and it looks fantastic!
By following Academic’s installation guide, I was able to setup Netlify to automatically build and deploy my changes, and the first version of my website was published in less than 10 minutes! The best of all is that I am able to use the Starter (free) tier of Netlify to host my website and tie it to my custom domain eson.dev.
Keeping it updated
Now that the Netlify pipeline has been setup, I simply have to push my changes to the Github repository, and everything will be automagically built and deployed live by Netlify in less than a minute. Sweet! 🎉
