Web-Development
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.
A Bug Hunter's Lens on Web Application Hardening
Corporate cybersecurity advice often fixates on compliance matrices, annual penetration test reports, and automated dependency scanners. Engineering teams spend days triaging medium-severity alerts for outdated utility libraries while missing the fundamental structural flaws sitting in plain sight inside their own application logic. During offensive security assessments and bug bounty research, automated scanners rarely discover the vulnerabilities that matter. The most devastating findings almost never involve exotic zero-day memory exploits or deep cryptographic breaks.