Weekly Journal 169 - Hugo, Nitric

Weekly Journal
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Hugo Migration

I’ve started working on my Hugo migration, but so far progress has been slow. Some things have changed with Hugo itself and the theme I was planning on using, so I’ve had to spend time getting everything sorted out and updated. Apparently Hugo used to bundle in a copy LibSass, but now it depends on Dart Sass. The theme I was working with needs a Sass transpiler, so I was getting some weird errors because it couldn’t find Dart Sass. Plus, the test site I’ve been playing with no longer builds and renders my articles. I’m not sure why, but that’s another thing I need to fix.

I’ve also been looking at themes again, and I found a few options that may be better suited to building digital garden. Specifically this digital garden theme looks interesting and I want to spend some more time testing it.

With some of these challenges I went back to see if the latest version of Hexo added features that would let me use it as a digital garden, but sadly it still isn’t really viable.

Nitric

Nitric is another new automation tool that I heard about on the FLOSS Weekly podcast. It’s a framework that sits on top of Pulumi and provides an additional abstraction layer for defining cloud infrastructure as code. The main premise that it’s truly multi-cloud, and that if you needed object storage on AWS and Azure, your Nitric code would automatically provision and S3 bucket on AWS and an Azure Object Storage bucket on Azure. It also has infrastructure visualization tools that update while you are building your infrastructure project.

Unfortunately, it looks like it’s another rug pull in the making. During the podcast the guests from Nitric mentioned they were looking to start using a Contributor License Agreement, which is generally a precursor to a community rug pull. I find it somewhat disingenuous that Nitric, who takes a dependency on Pulumi, would look to add restrictions on their product while depending on another open source product. I’ll keep an eye on Nitric as I do think it looks interesting, but I won’t be investing any time or effort into it. If they decide not to introduce the CLA, maybe I’ll take a closer look.