+++
template = "article.html"
title = "A new beginning"
date = 2019-10-31T21:05:00+11:00
description = "Resurrecting an inactive blog by migrating from Octopress to Hugo, and embarking on a journey to build everything with Bazel."

[taxonomies]
tags = ["bazel"]
+++

This blog has been inactive for a long time. I tried to at least post an article
yearly, and next thing you know, two years and a half fly by... Halloween seemed
like a good time to resurrect it.

I wanted to start writing again recently, and faced an issue: this blog was
using Octopress 2. Well, Octopress has [apparently been dead for even longer
than this blog](http://octopress.org/). So I wanted to switch to another static
generator. I found [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/), which is actively maintained and
ticked all the boxes I had, so that's what I settled for (sorry for the probable
RSS feed mess - while I set up 301 redirects for the old articles, I guess this
won't play nicely with any RSS reader. This is actually what prompted this
article...)

This could have been an hour worth of work - migrating the content (both Hugo
and Octopress are using Markdown, so that part was really simple), finding or
putting together a nice template, and call it a day. But how fun is that?
Instead, I chose to go with the most complex (hence fun, right?) approach
possible. And that was by using [Bazel](https://bazel.build/) to do
_everything_. Sass linting and pre-processing, HTML generation, generating a
Docker image, deploying it... and with tests for a lot of things along the way.
Today, the deployment part is still missing (I'm working on it), but everything
else is pretty much ready.

I plan to describe this whole journey soon, although I don't know exactly which
form it will take yet - probably a series of small articles covering a specific
aspect. In the meantime, welcome back on a brand-new blog!