A brand new site

Some years have passed since I started using GitHub: during these years many things have changed, and still are changing, in my life, in my job, and even in my relationship with my development hobby. One single thing has been a static, steady, firm, and invariant constant in all of this: my GitHub pages site. Until yesterday, it looked like this:

which looked nice enough for me some years ago. However, the times are a-changing and sites get old, and this personal site started to show its age.

I had to take all of my courage, and a deep breath, and started rewriting the site from scratch, using more up-to-date tools to render it, with the hope for it to be somewhat more dynamic and alive.

This time I chose Zola, the main reasons being its speed in re-rendering the pages in the development server (and in production use too), and its simplicity. I found it easier to use compared to other static site generators: easier to configure, easier to deal with in terms of template and theme management. Since it is developed in the Rust language, it becomes another Rust based tool in my toolbox: I do not prefer stuff developed in Rust over the rest, I just notice that many developers (including me) start to prefer Rust as their development framework. This makes me happy, not because I'm a mere Rust supporter, but because the list of available crates is becoming very well assorted, not to say just huge, and it looks like Rust is becoming, in a way, the Python of systems programming - Python being my other preferred environment to build applications (or just for quick scripts) when speed and lightness are not my first concern.

When I first started approaching Rust, like four years ago, it was already quite popular, and there were a lot of available libraries to assist in building almost everything. However, sometimes it was quite hard to find what was really needed. Now it's easy to find more than one module to achieve a result, with differences that can be used to fine tune a project.

As it happened in the previous version, I don't expect to update this site a lot: I mostly update the repository pages when there are significant changes, new releases, and so on. However, a more structured site (perhaps) will help me more active in updating it, and maybe, from time to time, some more contents will pop up.