What I wanted to do for a long time, but didn’t have the time to do (or I thought I didn’t have the time): I finally got this website up and running, with the blog you’re reading right now, technical documentation and my portfolio.

It was an exciting excursion back to the roots, where I started about 25 years ago: with static websites (and C and C++, which is not of importance here). At the time when sysadmins used to keep their holy notes about sendmail configurations and cryptic command lines in shoe-boxes, I used sed and awk to build a simple generator for a static website which contained all my IT related notes – websites were static at that time, with a few exceptions.

Via a long extinct language, WebDAL (Web Data Access Language), I came to building dynamic websites. WebDAL was followed by PHP, but PHP always felt strange to me. Nevertheless, the sed/awk solution for my documentation system gave way to a WiKi written in PHP called DokuWiki, that until the end of last year was in operation under the principle “it runs, don’t touch it” (in the sense of PHP updates).

I got in touch with Java around 2000. Java for the web was no fun in the 2000s. Applets were some sort of cool, but only apparently. Servlets were not even apparently cool. With JSP the whole thing became a bit more bearable, but for me, they still weren’t the last word. In 2004 the first version of JSF was released. My impression back then: have fun with getting that straight. If that is usable, I’m in. That was the case in 2017 with JSF 2.3. Since then the development with JSF is fun. Until that time, I worked with JSP in the frontend, but if possible, concentrated on the backend in projects.

What mainly kept me from switching from PHP/DokuWiki to a Java solution were and still are CMS (Content Management Systems) and WiKis in Java. The CMS and Wiki in Java that I know, that are stable, have enough features for a good documentation system, are brute knockers with a considerable need of resources. Nothing you want to run on a laptop.

In the middle of 2021 I came across a static site generator named HUGO. I wasn’t even aware that people still (or again) build static websites. After a few tests with HUGO, it was clear that HUGO is the new system for my documentation. By the way, this website is also generated with HUGO. Moreover, HUGO is written in GO, a language I’ve been interested in for a while, but for which I also had “no time” until now. At least I can now work with the GO slang in which HUGO templates are written.

So don’t be surprised, that the first articles and docs, which are written by a Java developer, who is mainly working on the backend, are dominated by frontend topics, HUGO and the like. This stuff has to go into the documentation system before I “don’t have the time” to do it.