F*ck React – Part 1: A Minimalist’s finds Hugo + 渋い

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(clickbait title haha)

I found that interesting because I thought personal pages had to be flashy and have trending effects. For me, that was the barrier to publishing my own website, as I absolutely hate JS and these frontend libraries (nothing against people who love such things).

This led me to find the best static site generator for my needs: Hugo, paired with this template – shoutout to ntk148v for this amazing 🪄 minimal theme.

I found Karpathy’s point of view (read Part 0) interesting because I thought personal pages had to be flashy and have trending effects. For me, that was the barrier to publishing my own website, as I absolutely hate JS and these frontend libraries (nothing against people who love such things).

This led me to find the best static site generator for my needs: Hugo, paired with this template – shoutout to ntk148v for this amazing 🪄 minimal theme.

One of Hugo’s biggest benefits is that you can edit your content using Markdown files in /content/. Theme customizations are also easy, as you only need to edit /assets/css/custom.css to override the default styles in /assets/css/main.css. Layouts can be customized in /layouts/, while further configuration can be changed in hugo.toml.

After that, I roughly designed (picture below) how I wanted the website to look and customized the theme and layout with the assistance of Hermes, and of course filled in the content myself. For the colors, I took inspiration from Nous Research. I also added separate pages for my CV (have not uploaded the public version yet), contact, and writings.

Deploying with GitHub Pages is simple, as every push to main triggers the GitHub Actions workflow automatically and Hugo builds the site.

F*ck React – Part 0: Beginning Of A Minimalist’s Homepage

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(clickbait title haha)

Anyone who is interested in AI (sorry for bringing up this word) knows Andrej Karpathy. While reading through his homepage (last visited: 09/09/26), I stumbled upon this paragraph:

0 frameworks were used to make this simple responsive website because I am becoming seriously allergic to 500-pound websites. This one is pure HTML and CSS in two static files and that’s it.