Why build this webpage?

Studying, knowledge sharing, and memory retention.

I was studying and reviewing C/C++ fundamentals a few weeks ago. I recalled that I typically retain information better when I am required to explain it to others. This relization came to me during my time in University. I would naturally have a sufficient understanding of a topic, if I could explain it to others, and field some basic follow-up questions. If I could not, it was a sign that my knowledge was not sufficient on the topic.

I am going to try to continue this activity of explaining newly learned topics to others through this blog, to help share information with others, in addition to enhancing my own education.

Building this website

After deciding that I would like to start a blog, my next thought was to review various options to find a cost effective solution. That being said, I was not looking for the cheapest option, but one which would allow for reliable web hosting, at a reasonable price.

After doing a mild amount of research on domain registrars, I decided to register this domain with google’s domain registrar service.

The next infrastructure requirement was to decide on a solution to store my static HTML pages. I have been seeing that “familiarity with cloud services"on various LinkedIn job posting. I quickly decided to look into AWS for static web hosting. The benefit here, is that this tool seems to be used in the industry, and so I could learn some useful skills while building this website.

For now, my web-development aspirations are limited to building a simple personal website. That said, I quickly ruled out hosting a dynamic website, as it seems static content is sufficient for my needs here.

I briefly considered writing HTML and CSS files from scratch; the main purpose of this website is for educational purposes after all. However, I quickly decided to use a static webpage generator/template tool. My current full-time job is as a ASIC Engineer, and I do not have a desire to career change into web development. I chose to use tools to get the website off the ground more quickly, in order to start posting about various topics I am studying within my current industry.

I ended up deciding on the following::

• Google domain registrar
• AWS S3 for file hosting
• AWS Route 53 for DNS services
• Hugo, static webpage generation

Some notes about each tool below.

Google Domains

From brief research over forums, there were mixed reviews over smaller companies which register domains. From my search, I found Google’s customer service rating was consistently high amongst most reviews. When comping prices amongst the various registrars, the price difference was negligible, and so I went with Google.

AWS S3 for file hosting

As mentioned above, using AWS was a pre-requisite of sorts, as I wanted to gain some experience using these tools. AWS S3 for file hosting appeared to be a low cost service for static web hosting. It is a pay-per-use service, so we’ll see if it is in-fact low cost in a few months of web hosting.

AWS DNS (Route 53) services

I selected Route 53, for ease of use with AWS S3.

Hugo

Hugo had some various minimalist templates, and simple instructions. Why not start here? I could not come up with a reason to avoid Hugo, so I gave it a test run using a local server to add some placeholder content. The process was simple enough, so chose to move forward with Hugo as my static webpage generator of choice.