Picking a theme #

This was definitely the easy part of the whole project.

I didn’t want to develop the page myself, and there are a lot of reasons why, but here are the two main reasons, the most impactful ones:

• I wanted to have the content online and as fast as possible;
• I also wanted to have it be similar to the stack I was already used to.

And here’s why.

Getting the content live, fast #

I believe a lot of blogs from developers never see the light of the day.

Usually, devs want to make their own blog, with the coolest features, high performance and using the framework of the hour.

Instead of focusing on the objective of a blog which is, above all, write something and publishing it.

Even though am a developer at heart, I prefer to see any content I make in the way it helps someone: live so others can take advantage of it. That’s also why I like to have things go live fast and improve on it slowly.

Getting the content live fast has its benefits:

• Early feedback: People tend to be vocal about things that don’t work for them or that they think can be improved in some way, these taken with a grain of salt can be really useful;
• Hypothesis validation: I always thought people would benefit of a friendly content about Git, one that has simple words, and well structured. The way people having been reacting to them as proof of what I imagined.

It is also worth mentioning that these two benefits don’t even touch things like creating a portfólio and learning new skills which are also very welcomed.

GitFichas stack #

I also like to rely on structures that are have a low investment of time to maintain and that’s why tend to chose things like GitHub Pages and Jekyll, that allow me to put a page online in a matter of minutes a lot of times even without have to run anything locally. I also used Netlify for the first time.

I long time ago I wrote a tutorial that teaches step-by-step how to get a website live using Jekyll and Github Pages in case you want to try that for yourself.

Since I know these two tools, GitHub Pages and Jekyll really well I tend to use it a lot. They have a well established community that use both of them and good docs I can rely on. Last but no least there’s also a lot of things ready you can reuse.

For example if you access my blog, GitFichas or even Pizza de Dados podcast website, you may be surprised to know that all of them are live using Jekyll and GitHub Pages. Also, all of them use themes that were adapted to implement features that were required.

In GitFichas case I needed a theme there were focused on images, so after browsing through library of Jekyll themes, I found this portfolio theme that seemed to be what I needed. In case you want to understand how I pick themes you can checkout this other blog post.

The chosen theme has its particularities, but with the choice made, next step was get everything online.