Hugo is one of the fastest static site generators available, and it is particularly well-suited for technical blogs. In this post, we will walk through why Hugo stands out and how to get a blog running from zero.

Why Hugo?

There are plenty of static site generators to choose from — Jekyll, Eleventy, Astro, Next.js — but Hugo has a few properties that make it compelling for engineering blogs:

• Speed. Hugo builds are measured in milliseconds, not seconds. A site with hundreds of posts still builds in under a second.
• Single binary. No Node.js, no Ruby, no Python runtime. Install one binary and you are done.
• Batteries included. Taxonomies, RSS, sitemaps, syntax highlighting, and image processing are all built in.

Installation

On macOS with Homebrew:

brew install hugo

Verify the installation:

hugo version

Creating a Site

hugo new site my-blog
cd my-blog

Adding a Theme

Hugo has a rich theme ecosystem. For a clean, professional look, PaperMod is an excellent choice:

git submodule add https://github.com/adityatelange/hugo-PaperMod.git themes/PaperMod

Then set theme = 'PaperMod' in your hugo.toml.

Writing Your First Post

hugo new content posts/my-first-post/index.md

This creates a new post using the archetype template, pre-filled with frontmatter fields for date, tags, categories, and more.

What’s Next

Once you have the basics running, there is a lot more to explore — custom shortcodes, deployment pipelines, and content organization strategies. Check out the post on Docker Compose for local development for an example of how we structure technical content on this blog.