front matter
Hugo was born out of two beliefs: 1) website maintenance (authoring, hosting, securing, etc.) could be dramatically simplified, and 2) the Go programming language and its ecosystem would provide the right base for a fast, straightforward, and productive website engine.
As I write this in late spring of 2022, we’re approaching the ninth anniversary of Hugo’s first public announcement (June 2013). Reflecting back to the months leading up to Hugo’s first release, I had recently begun investigating a new programming language from Google, the Go programming language. It had just reached 1.0 status, and I was looking for a project so I could learn through building. Simultaneously, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with my WordPress-powered blog that was growing in cost and complexity. I calculated that I had spent more time doing maintenance and security patches than authoring new posts.
I had begun playing with the static site generators available at the time; Jekyll and Pelican being the two most prominent. Installing was complicated, however, taking me a few hours each because they both required me to first install the entire toolset for each programming language and then all the language dependencies. After that, I needed to install the software and all of its dependencies, requiring hundreds of packages to be fetched and resolved.