Imagine transforming a spark of inspiration into a tangible project in less time than it takes a weekend. This is not just a possibility; It is my recent reality. On one of these last weekends, an idea that had been floating around in my head came to life. Before dawn on Monday, angeljramos.com was not just a domain in waiting, but an open door to my coaching and mentoring services. This is just one of several projects I’ve launched quickly and efficiently, using tools that balance power and simplicity. In this post, I want to share with you how to turn a flash of creativity into a working project in record time.
In any of these initiatives, my goal was to have a first version, something like a minimal lovable product ( MLP, a derivative of the concept of MVP, Minimum Viable Product), simple but that would lay the foundations for those small side projects and that would also be quick to do, investing no more than a few hours of the weekend.
In this article, I would like to tell you what the decision criteria were when selecting the tools to make these projects a reality, and tell a little about the bases of these tools. In later articles, I can go into the fine-grain detail of how I have built and deployed these projects.
At this point in the post, I have already generated enough hype for you to be wondering what those initiatives are, let’s get to it:
angeljramos.com for a long time I wanted to have a point of reference for my coaching and mentoring activities, something simple, a landing page with a contact form so that it would be easy to contact me. Yes, it is true that the demand generation for my coaching processes does not come online, it comes more through other channels that I will discuss another day, but at least I wanted to have that reference point with a prism in the specific domain of coaching and mentoring, and by definition outside of LinkedIn.
cuentacuentosdigital.com I wanted to use this project as a mechanism to apply everything I have been learning about artificial intelligence in recent months, in this case to create personalized stories for children using Generative AI, you can see an example here.
techiemono.com the blog where you are reading this post, where the purpose is to have a space for reflection for the topics that I am learning about in different aspects that interest me, cloud, product management, intelligence artificial, CPS, etc.
Once the projects have been presented, I will tell you a little secret, I have done them all with the same tool but with different variations. And by tool I basically mean the technology that supports the information architecture and user experience, there are other details that I will tell in other posts such as the hosting part, the deployment mechanisms (CI/CD Pipelines), etc. On the other hand, these projects are evolving, so they will mutate as I collect information and learn.
This tool is Hugo, which is a quite popular open-source static site generator, some of its features include: 1) it is super fast, the pages are generated below the second, 2) it is flexible, it has CMS capabilities 3) it is simple, which allows you to learn very quickly but without limiting yourself because 4) it is extensible in addition to being 5) multilingual out of the box.
While it is true that there are other more traditional tools such as Jekyll or more modern ones such as Astro, which can also do the magic, Hugo was more in line with what I needed according to the decision criteria I had established for the projects.
These criteria for the tools were the following:
That they had a quick learning curve because I wanted to focus above all on adding value through the vision I had of the projects. In this case, I had already used Hugo on Goxo as our customer directory tool and knew a little about his way of working.
That they compile statically because I wanted it to be very lightweight to control hosting costs and to have good latency and by extension impact the user experience.
That it scaled well, here my experience in Goxo also helped me, as it had worked very well with all the clients we had.
That it focused on the content, rather than on everything around the content, for that it was very important to find some good themes that I could reuse and modify in a simple way, in the case of the coaching page angeljramos. com I have used a theme called Hugobricks and in the case of this blog and the digital storytelling project I used the Blowfish theme. More about them in future posts.
Related to content and especially important in the blog, having indexing capabilities, categorization of content. In this case Hugo has taxonomies that allow you to group and create views based on those taxonomies in a very simple way. For example, visit the tags of this site.
Multi-language, although initially I had planned to make a first version in Spanish, I did not rule out making its corresponding version in English, as has finally happened in the case of the blog.
Both to favor the learning curve of Hugo and the themes, it was essential to have good documentation, supported not only by the project but also by a large community of enthusiasts of the tool.
Finally, the last requirement was that it be compatible with viewing on mobile phones, for obvious reasons given the current context in which we live.
There are other criteria that I had thought about, but they were second order, such as potential maintainability, community, but I think that in this case they were not so relevant for the mere fact that it was something more MVP and I was not thinking about a time window very long. Although having Hugo in mind I have applied a bit of the Lindy effect to think more long term.
In short, Hugo is a tool that has allowed me to launch content-based projects in a very quick and easy way, and that has all the capabilities so that you can focus on the content.
Write to me sharing your experiences in creating projects of this type. What tools would you have used? Would you have changed the selection criteria? If you need help launching your personal project, don’t hesitate to contact me.