David FengHello World!
Happy New Year!
My current personal portfolio site hasn’t seen major changes since its inception about 1.5 years ago. I’ve been working as a software developer for a year and I think the site deserves a major upgrade.
I learned about static site generator a couple of days ago, and it seems like exactly what I need. Since I am learning golang, I decided to give Hugo a try. After going through Mike Dane’s Hugo tutorial (highly recommended. It seems that you don’t really need to know a lot of golang to use Hugo) and some setup, my new personal website is live at https://beta.davidfeng.us/ now! I plan to move it to https://davidfeng.us/ once I think it’s in a better shape.
The new site is definitely a lot better than previous versions. Some of the features that I like the most includes:
- I can have a blog with unlimited pages without having to manage all the HTML files myself
- It is easy to organize multiple pages via the taxonomy mechanisms provided in Hugo (categories and tags)
- I like the Hermit theme a lot!
I am pretty sure I’ll discover more good stuff as I spend more time with Hugo.
Previous versions
It is always interesting to look back in time to see old versions of my personal site/page. It seems I consistently updated the design of the site every two years since 2013.
2013
I am pretty sure this is not my first attempt to build a personal website, but it’s the oldest one that I can find. I was a chemistry graduate student at the University of Chicago, and I did not really know a lot about HTML/CSS. I wrote all HTML and CSS by hand. The site contains no JavaScript (except Google Analytics). I even put some strange badges on the site because I was so proud that the site passed some w3c XHTML and CSS tests that I can’t remember now.
2015
The content did not really change. The biggest change is the usage of Bootstrap, which looks much better than my hand written CSS. It is also mobile friendly.
2017
I built this site during the job search curriculum at AppAcademy. The content is brand new since I’m trying to get hired as a software developer, not as a research chemist. It contains only one page. I used the prologue template from HTML5UP, and I edited the HTML and CSS files directly.