Why I Decided to Build My Blog

In an world where platforms like Substack, Medium, and LinkedIn dominate the content landscape, you might wonder—why bother coding your blog?
For me, it came down to three things:

  • Ownership: Full control over my content, design, and data
  • Learning: Improving my coding skills, even starting simple
  • Creative Freedom: No platform restrictions I wanted a clean, fast, no-bloat experience that I could fully control, learn, update, and evolve over time.

Step 1: Choosing Hugo

I chose Hugo, a popular static site generator, because:

  • It’s incredibly fast (milliseconds to build my site)
  • It’s relatively easy to deploy (perfect for hosting on GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel)
  • It allows full customization without locking me into any platform

Hugo builds your blog as simple HTML files — no databases, no servers to manage.

Step 2: Picking the Right Theme

I went with PaperMod, a lightweight and elegant Hugo theme, which gave me:

  • A clean homepage
  • Easy blog post navigation
  • Dark mode toggle (with one line of config!)
  • Support for social links like GitHub and LinkedIn

I customized it to fit my style—even adding a direct link to my Substack newsletter!

Step 3: Writing and Publishing Content

Creating new blog posts is as easy as running:

CopyEdit
hugo new blog/my-new-article.md

I write in simple Markdown (.md files), add a few front-matter fields like title, date, and tags—and boom. My article is live after a quick git push to GitHub.

Bonus: My site rebuilds and deploys automatically through my GitHub connection.

Lessons Learned

Start simple. Don’t overthink themes or customizations early on. Own your platform. No algorithms. No restrictions. It’s truly my digital home. Consistency wins. The key to building a blog isn’t fancy design—it’s writing and sharing regularly.

What’s Next

Now that my blog is live, I’m excited to: Post insights on tech, security, GRC and leadership Share my learning journey openly Grow my newsletter audience alongside my blog It’s just the beginning—and it already feels incredible to have full ownership of my writing platform.

Thanks for reading!

Curious about building your own blog? Feel free to reach out — I’d be happy to share tips from the trenches.