From Zero to Portfolio

When I started the Professional Networking module at Howest, one of the first requirements was to get a portfolio website online. This post explains exactly how I built this site and how I keep it updated.

The Stack

This site is built with Hugo, an open-source static site generator written in Go. Hugo takes Markdown files and converts them into a full website at lightning speed (we’re talking milliseconds per build). No database, no backend, no CMS complexity. Just files and a terminal.

The theme I’m using is Hugo Theme Stack by Jimmy Cai. It’s a clean, card-style blog theme that supports dark mode, categories, tags, and a table of contents out of the box, everything I needed for a professional-looking portfolio without reinventing the wheel.

Domain & Hosting

For hosting and the domain name I used Combell, available for free to students via Academic Software. If you’re a Howest student and haven’t checked Academic Software yet, go look. It’s genuinely useful.

The domain adeceun.be is registered through Combell and points to my VPS (Virtual Private Server), also from Combell. The site is served via Nginx as a static file server. Hugo generates the public/ folder and Nginx serves it directly.

Workflow: How I Add a New Post

Adding a new post is straightforward:

1. SSH into my VPS: ssh aaron@vmi2480784
2. Navigate to the site folder: cd ~/siteHowest/my-portfolio
3. Create a new Markdown file in content/post/
4. Write the post in Markdown (frontmatter at the top with title, date, tags, etc.)
5. Run hugo to rebuild the site
6. The updated public/ folder is immediately live

Total time to go from idea to published post: about 5 minutes once you’re comfortable with Markdown. There’s no login screen, no editor to load, no plugin to update. It’s just files.

Why Hugo Over WordPress or Wix?

I considered WordPress and Wix but went with Hugo because:

• Speed: Static sites are fast. No PHP, no database queries.
• Version control: All my posts are plain .md files I can track with Git.
• No vendor lock-in: I own the files. If Combell disappears tomorrow, I can host this anywhere.
• It’s technical: For a cybersecurity student, running a VPS and deploying via CLI is more impressive than dragging and dropping blocks in Wix.

Effort to Maintain

Realistically, adding a post takes 15–30 minutes including writing. The setup took a few hours the first time (getting Hugo configured, the theme set up, DNS pointed correctly), but now it’s a smooth process.

The only “gotcha” I ran into was that Hugo processes images from the assets/ folder, not static/. That caught me off guard when setting up the avatar. Everything in assets/img/ gets resized and optimized by Hugo automatically.

Summary

If you’re a fellow TI student looking to set up something similar, feel free to reach out.