name-needed VS Metalsmith

For my long term side project I just dump ideas into a barely organised backlog.md [^1]. After finishing a feature or taking a few months away, I normally dive back in by browsing this and choosing the next milestone.

It's worked well for a couple of years, and helps me keep the long term goals in mind.

[^1] https://github.com/DomWilliams0/name-needed/blob/develop/.pl...

https://domwillia.ms

It uses a custom static site generator because I needed to procrastinate somehow before starting the first post... Now it's nicely stable and punishing new posts is quick and easy

Location: Tallinn, Estonia (UK citizen intending to move there)

Remote: Willing to work partly remote but I require a sponsored visa to work in Estonia

Willing to relocate: Yes, to Tallinn :^)

Technologies: Rust, C, Python preferably, but C++ too. I enjoy low-level work focused on performance; see my toy OS, JVM implementation and game engine on my github profile.

Résumé/CV: https://domwillia.ms | https://github.com/DomWilliams0 | please reach out via email for my résumé

Email: [email protected]

I've written some pretty low-level OpenGL bindings in Rust, because the existing solutions are either too high level or over the top complexity wise.

At the time I only had experience with the OpenGL C api and didn't want to learn a totally different Rust abstraction or mix C/C++ libraries into a pure Rust project.

https://github.com/DomWilliams0/name-needed/tree/develop/ren...

I've been alternating between two long term Rust projects, which seems to work in keeping the motivation up for both!

A Dwarf Fortress-like game (and engine): https://github.com/DomWilliams0/name-needed

A x64 operating system: https://github.com/DomWilliams0/DomeOS

A Dwarf Fortress-like game (and engine) in Rust: https://github.com/DomWilliams0/name-needed

Ambitious to be sure, but after a year and a half I'm still consistently working on it, and still enjoying it!

Metalsmith — the best customizable SSG

I use Metalsmith. Been happy with it. I build my site into a self-contained nginx docker image.

const Metalsmith = require('metalsmith') const markdown = require('@metalsmith/markdown') const layouts = require('metalsmith-layouts') const permalinks = require('@metalsmith/permalinks') const collections = require('metalsmith-collections') Metalsmith(__dirname) .metadata({ sitename: 'Website Name', description: "Website description.", generator: 'Metalsmith', url: 'https://metalsmith.io/' }) .source('./src') .destination('./build') // .clean(true) .use( collections({ projects: 'pages/*.md', reverse: true, refer: true }) ) .use(markdown()) .use(permalinks()) .use( layouts({ engineOptions: { helpers: { formattedDate: function (date) { return new Date(date).toLocaleDateString() } } } }) ) .build(function (err, files) { if (err) throw err })

I also started to move to hugo, but they didn't merge the pr [2] which would have helped in the transition. :(

The look is still similar to what it was in the beginning, in terms of colors at least.

[1] https://github.com/metalsmith/metalsmith

Metalsmith

A static site generator I've been enjoying lately (and using for my blog) is Metalsmith: https://metalsmith.io/

It feel like it's the best of both worlds, because it's simple to learn and customize, but there are plugins for the things you don't want to spend time writing yourself.

For example, I'm using plugins to: check for broken links, generate an RSS feed, and run a test server with automatic reloading.

But then I was able to easily add in my own code to handle relative links, generate Graphviz diagrams, and format dates.

One other recommendation: I hated almost every template language I ran across (Hugo's, Liquid, Nunjucks, EJS), but I'm thrilled with the simplicity of Handlebars (https://handlebarsjs.com/), although it is a bit limiting and the "block helper with parameters" syntax is strange (perhaps an indicator that I'm trying to do too much in the templating language!).

I believe Metalsmith [1] is trying that approach

[1] https://metalsmith.io/