My old site, rekous.com, was originally built back in 2013, right after I finished school. At the time, PHP was still one of the dominant languages for building websites, and during an internship I learned MVC concepts using CodeIgniter.

That experience led to a few freelance projects building websites for small businesses. One recurring challenge, though, was that many of my clients weren’t particularly computer-savvy. Handing them something as over-bloated as WordPress would have been a nightmare—for them and for me.

So instead, I built a fully functional, bare-bones CMS (Content Management System). It wasn’t fancy, but it was flexible, simple, and did exactly what it needed to do. I reused that framework not only for my own site, but for about three or four paying clients as well. It worked well enough to get the job done—and it paid the bills.

Over the years, those client businesses eventually shut down, and I found myself hosting only my own site.

At some point, I realized I just wanted something new.

I’d also been putting off a much-needed cleanup: my old Ubuntu 12.04 (Trusty) droplet had been end-of-life for about six years. It was long overdue for retirement.

The final push came from my daughter, who wanted a Minecraft server for her and her friends. I told her I could host it—but only if I finally updated my droplet.

While tearing down the old setup, I transferred anything remotely worth saving. There wasn’t much: a few pictures, a mini project or two, and a MySQL dump that I have zero intention of ever restoring. Still, I felt a surprising amount of nostalgia going through it all.

Ultimately, I wanted something fresh. I’ve always been a fan of simple, minimal design, and I wanted to move away from a clunky, database-driven site entirely. Managing a SQL database for a personal site just didn’t make sense anymore.

That led me to static site generators—and eventually to Hugo. I installed a minimal theme I liked, and for the first time in a long while, the site felt lightweight, modern, and enjoyable again.

Sometimes starting over is the cleanest upgrade.