Notes from "Hugo 101" presentations

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Yesterday, 2023.10.24 from 6-8pm Eastern European Summer Time, I took the content of this repo and used it to give a presentation to some college students at Tampere University, titled "Hugo 101: Websites for Little Guys". The sides can be found at my blog, which is itself (of course) run on Hugo:
https://andrew-quinn.me/hugo-101/

In the interest of continuous improvement I'm going to track this and future Hugo 101 presentations in a lightweight GitHub Discussions thread. It also makes a great place to show people as a talking point!

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Notes from Hugo 101, 2023.10.24, TEK Lounge, Tampere University:

Overall notes

• Turnout was great! Much greater than the 5-7 people max I was expecting, it was more like 15-20.
• Turnout of both underrepresented groups in tech and non-CS major people was quite good as well!
• A few folks left early, which is normal for college events! Regardless I should have handed out business cards at the start, to account for this.
• The magic happened when I showed people how to write Markdown on the left, and have their website auto reload on the right. Maybe stick that demonstration in right at the start next time? Better yet, quickly run through the steps myself to show people what success looks like at each phase, and then turn towards the long tail of troubleshooting.

Technical issues

• DO NOT. USE. NOTEPAD. NOTEPAD defaults off to UTF-16 LE, not UTF-8, and messes up EVERYTHING Hugo works with. Hugo needs UTF-8 for every file OOTB. Serves me right for using ancient Windows builtins!
• Mix was about 2/3 Windows, 1/3 Mac, maybe 2 or 3 people following along with my VirtualBox VM advice.
• echo >> proved a surprising pain point. For example We had a lot of members of the audience who were using CJK terminals, which s p a c e o u t w e s t e r n c h a r a c t e r s in an echo. Maybe best to replace those with touch, have everyone install Notepad++ or something, and then edit each file by hand?
• Chocolatey and Scoop should ALWAYS be provided as options for installing things on Windows. Not everyone has the same international offerings on the Microsoft Store.
• In Mac you can't copy and paste the comments in minimum viable Hugo (!?!) Very strange!
• We also had a really strange ARM MacBook issue with installing Homebrew! There was a workaround lower down on the page, but it didn't work for the whole time, and I'm not totally sure what to say about that.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

💡 Next time I run this workshop, I should probably split people up into groups of 3-4 by OS, since there are a lot of weird issues that can pop up that once one person fixes it the info spreads to everyone else. Kind of like a breakout room but irl.

💡💡 That also lets me lightly incentivize getting people to do all this in a VirtualBox VM -- that's the way I'm doing it, the presenter, so that's the group I'm most equipped to help personally.