Lightning Fast with Hugo
April 24, 2019
What is HUGO?
I get it, there are a lot of frameworks, libraries, and tools out there. Too many to name or know all of them. It seems with software nowadays; especially in front-end development there is a new tool or framework almost every other day and it can be tough to keep up or know which ones to make use of. In my opinion, devs should have an open mind and at least try things out and build out a demo application to see how they work and if it might be something that can benefit them or their team. New frameworks keep things exciting & are being created to make our lives as developers more efficient.
They can be relatively easy to understand as long as there is a firm grasp of the fundamentals & underlying technologies/concepts that these tools use and were built on. With enough practice they can increase our development speed exponentially. Many of these tools are generally trying to accomplish the same thing as is the case with HUGO, an awesome and lightning fast static website generator.
HUGO, Jekyll, Gatsby, all of these are static website generators but are built on different languages. I recently made a blog post about Jekyll which is built in Ruby. HUGO is made in GoLang, a language developed by Google. And lastly Gatsby, another great framework developed on React (an encompassing front-end framework built on JavaScript from the Facebook team).
Do I need to understand server side code to build?
I believe all developers should understand a full stack & how applications are working; both front-end and server side. That doesn’t mean programmers need to know every language and all of their paradigms (that would be too much although i’m sure there are those of you out there) but I think it’s important in whichever language you are coding in that you understand your stack and try building full stack programs yourself.
Whether that is MEAN, LAMP, Ruby on Rails, a random server side language with a Postgresdb or Mongo, a React front-end; it really doesn’t matter as long as you fully understand how it is working and are able to build efficiently. Too many people I know are hindering themselves by getting caught up in one single thing (which may not even last) & are not branching out by learning other languages and tools. We are in an industry in which you have to keep challenging yourself. I am primarily a front-end programmer & stick to mostly JavaScript programs built on Ember and React at work but I do have to understand our back-end systems which are all built with Java. I also try to keep up to date with server side trends and news. I’ve built out a few applications with Python & Ruby & will be practicing and working with them more often. When it comes to GoLang I have not built any applications with it so the answer is no you don’t necessarily need to know server side GoLang to build with Hugo but as I always stress; keep learning and building.
Why Hugo?
Recently I have been testing out the framework on personal projects and am really amazed by the sheer quickness of the sites i’ve made. From routing to rendering of templates, making use of its built in functions and variables, I don’t think i’ve experienced (at least from other static generators) anything as quick as HUGO. From what i’m seeing it is much faster than both Jekyll and Gatsby. I haven’t yet tested in production but in a future post I will go over a build tutorial on coding out a Hugo site & walk through the deployment process with Netlify. I am hearing good things from other developers about the cloud hosting company and want to give it a try soon. Just wanted to share some quick thoughts on the framework and why I am going to make use of it more often.
Personal blog by Alex Virdee, 