Hugo
Why I Rebuilt My Personal Site with Hugo and Semantic CSS in 2026
For nearly two years, my personal website was built on modern front-end machinery. It ran on Next.js with the App Router, React 19, Tailwind CSS, PostCSS, and Nodemailer server actions. On paper, this was an industry-standard stack. It gave me server-side rendering, API routes, automated code-splitting, and a familiar developer experience borrowed from large-scale client engagements. In practice, it was an absurd architectural mismatch. A personal website is primarily a publication engine for long-form technical prose, project documentation, and structured career history. It does not handle high-frequency transactional data. It does not require real-time WebSocket connections or multi-tenant database synchronization. Yet every time I wanted to publish a short essay or adjust a typography token, I was spinning up a heavyweight JavaScript toolchain, pulling down hundreds of megabytes of dependencies, and troubleshooting runtime hydration quirks.