Building a static site with Make and Go

About me

I'm a software engineer with over 5 years of experience professionally building software, mostly for the web.

The problem I wanted to solve

An easy to maintain, simple, website that could be modified on my own, with only HTML and CSS

What is A website?

A simple website built with a Go CLI Make, deployed to AWS.

Tech stack

Go, Make, HTML, CSS, Javascript, AWS, Github Actions

The process of building A website

I got started by writing some Go HTML templates, and creating a nice sketch of the website design. I then stitched together the templates with Make. Now, the only 2 dependencies the project has are Make, and Go, which makes long term project maintenance easy to deal with.

Challenges I faced

Ensuring that Make only regenerated the files that needed to be changed, and that the targets were able to be built in parallel. overtime the simplicity may get in the way, but atleast abastractions can be built incrementally. In general, it's best to encounter an problem multiple times before it's automated, or abstracted away. That way you don't waste time solving problems you may not encounter more than once.

Key learnings

Simplicity is an underrated feature.

Tips and advice

Don't bring in complexity from the start, otherwise you may never get off the ground.

Final thoughts and next steps

I plan on continuing the project, it's easy to add new blog posts, and the deployment is 100% automated, so complexity isn't getting in the way of writing blog posts.