Welcome to my first blog post! Since this is a personal site, it felt only right to start by talking about how this corner of the internet came to be.
When I decided to build my personal site, I wanted something fast, reliable, and easy to maintain. Hugo stood out for its incredible speed and its powerful static site generation capabilities. After exploring several options, I landed on PaperMod. It’s clean, responsive, and its “profile mode” perfectly fits my goal of a minimalist yet functional landing page.
The Tech Stack
| Component | Technology |
|---|---|
| SSG | Hugo |
| Theme | PaperMod |
| Forms | Formspark |
| Hosting | GitHub Pages |
| CI/CD | GitHub Actions |
Key Features
1. Minimalist Design
I’m using PaperMod in its Profile Mode, which focuses on a minimalist introduction and social links right on the landing page. It’s a perfect way to show who I am and what I do without unnecessary clutter. To enhance the user experience, I’ve also enabled features like:
- Fast Search: Powered by Fuse.js for instant results.
- Dark Mode: Automatically respects your system preferences.
- Social Icons: Direct links to my GitHub, LinkedIn, and Hugging Face.
2. Fully Automated CI/CD
Managing a site shouldn’t involve manual uploads. I’ve set up a GitHub Actions workflow that triggers automatically whenever I push to the main branch.
graph LR
A[Push to GitHub] --> B(GitHub Actions)
B --> C{Build Hugo Site}
C --> D[Minify Assets]
D --> E[Deploy to GitHub Pages]
E --> F[Live Website]
The pipeline handles:
- Hugo Extended Installation: Ensuring support for SCSS/SASS.
- Minification: Compressing HTML, CSS, and JS to ensure lightning-fast load times.
- Deployment: Pushing the final build artifacts to GitHub Pages within seconds.
3. Serverless Contact Form
Instead of maintaining a full backend for a simple contact form, I integrated Formspark. It provides a simple endpoint for form submissions, making it easy to receive messages while keeping the site entirely static and secure. You can find it on my Contact page.
4. Privacy & Compliance
Operating from Germany means compliance is non-negotiable. I’ve ensured the site includes a proper Imprint and Data Privacy statement to meet GDPR requirements.
What’s Next?
This site will be a place for me to share my thoughts on AI engineering, Machine Learning, and whatever technical projects I’m currently working on.
Expect more deep dives into:
- Building Agentic Workflows.
- Local LLM deployment.
- Technical challenges in AI engineering.
Stay tuned for more updates as I continue to build and share!