github-docs VS Hugo

In college, an English professor would ask me and other students the following question when reviewing our essays, “Where are the examples?” Developers ask the same question when reading your documentation. To write good technical writing documents, include examples that developers can see themselves implementing in their work. How can this be done? By adding examples from your product’s codebase! 🙂 Let’s look at this code snippet from my contribution to GitHub’s documentation:

Need an example? Check the GitHub docs contributing guide.

git clone https://github.com/github/docs.git 123.57s user 37.02s system 74% cpu 3:35.73 total

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/github/docs.git 3.37s user 1.83s system 35% cpu 14.521 total

Not a scientific test at all, but the second one was literally 35x faster, wall clock time.

Docs

The strange thing is that I only have this problem with github, all other websites work just fine. And even docs.github.com works fine...

99.9 at best for enterprise cloud: https://github.com/github/docs/blob/main/content/site-policy/site-policy-deprecated/github-enterprise-service-level-agreement.md

A project repository typically has a license file at the top-level indicating which license the code falls under. See here for an example license file.

At one point though I realized there is a scaling problem with my build minutes. I knew that golang has considerably faster builds and in my case the easy fix is swapping over to Hugo.

This blog is running on Hugo. It had previously been running on Jekyll. Both these SSGs ship with the ability to create excerpts from your markdown content in 1 line or thereabouts.

Hugo

Hugo is a popular static site generator specifically designed to create websites and documentation lightning-fast. Its minimalist approach, emphasis on speed, and ease of use have made it popular among developers, technical writers, and anybody looking to construct high-quality websites without the complexity of typical CMS platforms.

As per many other comments, it sounds like a static site generator like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/), hosted on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) or GitLab Pages (https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/), would be a good match. If you set up GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to do the build and deploy (see e.g. https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/), your normal workflow will simply be to edit markdown and do a git push to make your changes live. There are a number of pre-built themes (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/) you can use, and these are realtively straightforward to tweak to your requirements.

Create the technical documentation of your project You can use any of the following options: * A wiki, like the ArchWiki that uses MediaWiki * Read the Docs, used by projects like Setuptools. Check Awesome Read the Docs for more examples. * Create a website * Create a blog, like the documentation of Blowfish, a theme for Hugo.

Doing this made me appreciate existing SSGs like Hugo and Next.js even more👏👏

I suggest hugo: https://gohugo.io/

Generates a completely static website from MD (and other formats) files; also handles themes (including a lot of them rendering well on mobile), and different types of content - posts, articles, etc. - depending on the theme.

It's open source and, being completely static, cheap as fuck to self host.