From a very young age Diogo became interested in the world of programming. Now, with two years of experience in IT, he works as a software engineer in a renowned banking institution in Portugal. Always willing to learn more and to accept new challenges, today he writes to us about his experience with the Hugo platform:

Launched on 5^th July 2013, Hugo is the fastest static page generation platform I’ve ever encountered. It is written in the Go language, maintained by Google, and allows you to create static blogs, pages and websites from easy to work with and easy to understand elements.

How did I find Hugo?

In my professional experience, I have configured dozens of websites on WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, which ended up being expensive in terms of maintenance, since the plugins required by the clients would constantly be vulnerable to 0day exploits, thus exposing personal information of the users of the websites to users with bad intentions.

Hugo solves this scenario, not only because it has an incredible performance, but it is also secure. Since all pages are static and only generated when the site is published, no data will be exposed to the public. This is extremely useful for blogs with thousands of visitors, where the price of hosting can often be a heavy burden at the end of the month… It is so light and stable, that companies like Netlify already allow the creation of websites with this framework for free (with limitations, of course), for small businesses or for personal use. If a user prefers to base their website on a template, the framework itself promotes the creations of all contributors on its website, as can be seen here.

Yes, but what if I want to add content?

To create a blog or custom pages, you just need to write the content you want in Markdown (.md), which is a simple to use markup language. When you run the static site build, Hugo will process all the .md documents and create the corresponding .html documents that will be publicly available on your website.

So… what about documentation?

As with all good frameworks, the documentation is very well organised and very accessible, even for beginners in the world of programming and web development, which may also promote learning new subjects using the same language, Go.

As it is already 8 years old, is it used in any company?

Yes, and developers have no problem publicising the companies whose websites use Hugo for their creation. I now share some of these pages, with a large number of visits, which were built on this framework:

– Let’s Encrypt

– fireship.io

– forestry.io

Among these, there are many others that can be consulted at gohugo.io/showcase.

What can we conclude?

In consulting firms, or projects where pages are mostly static, it makes perfect sense to use this new framework, not only to save money on hosting but also on maintenance. But as all frameworks are an open book… you can create all kinds of applications!”

Diogo Machado

Software Engineer – PrimeIT