Reboot

I spent some time on GenAI-assisted coding last year, and when I wrapped up and published a small project I was working on, I felt like it would be a nice idea to write a blog post about it. While it’s a small project and it’s unlikely to be of interest to anyone but me, I thought it would be a good opportunity start sharing my experience on a broader topic of vibe-coding and modern programming in general.

When I was about to start writing that post, I realized tham my blog was… well, a bit of a mess at that point. I created it back in 2012, using Python 2 and a customized version of Hyde static generator, which is not maintained these days. Some Python packages I used back then are no longer available, others were severely outdated. I spent about an hour installing Python 2 and finding a set of package versions that would make it render and run locally, but of course it wasn’t a viable long-term solution. I had to migrate.

Additionally, my old blog was fully in Russian, and since I don’t live there for quite a while now, I wanted to make it multi-lingual, starting with English. There were other niceties I wanted to add, like dark and light themes or better code highlighting, and hacking an unsupported static generator on Python 2 to do all that didn’t feel worth the effort.

Meet Hugo

I chose Hugo as the new generator because it’s fast, stable, and has no dependencies. In the next few days I spent some time choosing a theme to start with (I chose LoveIt) and customizing it. I wanted to keep the overall look and structure of the blog, at least initially, and I think I’ve managed to it that pretty well. LLMs did a pretty good job at making the customizations I wanted to do.

By far the easiest part was translating old posts into a new language. I did all of that automatically, with some proof-reading. I’ll likely keep using this approach in for future posts, except I will start from the English version.

Whast’s next?

More posts, of course. Now that everything is set up and ready, writing that post (and others) will be easier. I have a number of topics in mind and I want to get into a habit of writing, so let’s see how it goes.