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Back in August 2022, I posted about Ephemeral environments and compared GitPod and Replit. While Codespaces was first made GA in August 2021, making it fairly mature then, there were no free plans yet so I didn’t spend any time in it. Fast forward to November 2022, and GitHub has released free offerings for Codespaces. As of writing, a free GitHub account can use up to 60 hours for free. It is time to revisit Ephemeral Environments and play with GitHub Codespaces....

Ephemeral developer environments are short-lived and typically serve a single purpose. Perhaps you are away from your development computer or you are working on completely different projects and don’t want to “polute” one or the other. For instance, I have a policy of not mixing up work and personal projects. If I am not at home, I typically don’t have my blog code or environment setup. I spent some time working with both gitpod....

So, the first obvious question is: what’s wrong with Jekyll? Overall, Jekyll is fine. I just never liked how hard it is to install it on Windows. For the most part, I made most of my blog changes blindly. That includes structure, style, and blog posts. The next big question is: why Hugo? Well… It is super easy to install for one. But it is also popular, easy to use, and works similarly to Jekyll....

Recently, I run a GT Metrix test on my blog and got an abysmal D score. After some investigation I noticed a few things that need improvement: Disqus was loading too many things that I really didn’t care for. This included ads. Many scripts, styles and images were not optimized nor entirely needed. No browser caching was implemented To fix Disqus problem I removed it entirely, I really don’t like ads, specially how Disqus introduced them in their free offering....