TL;DR Currently, there are several solutions to build and host your personal website. I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could do it with the same set of features as some of the paid solutions out there and for free. Here are the results. Why would a PM build their own homepage from scratch… A couple of months ago I decided that I wanted to start writing more in order to a) exercise my writing skills and b) get feedback on some of my ideas. With this goal in mind, I started researching tools/platforms that would help me publish without creating too much friction for me, or for the people wanting to read what I have to say e.g. having to pay. Ultimately I decided upon creating my own website. I had a couple of reasons for wanting to try this: - challenge me to see if I, a previous software engineering student, could still bodge something together that would work and feel good about not having forgotten everything I ever learned about programming, - find a flexible free solution that would allow me to kickstart my website without investing money right away into it, aka avoiding operational costs with platforms and services that would lock me in the future, - have my content hosted in a place that will not require people to pay for reading it, - play around with Docker's developer environments and Microsoft's developer containers to get myself familiar with both solutions. Let’s get started… After some research, I decided to choose a website generator framework and a free hosting service. For the website framework, I choose Hugo with Congo as the theme, and for the hosting service Firebase.

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