aaron shah

How To Build a Site Just Like This One

Building a website doesn't have to be difficult. In fact, you can get started in just a few minutes with Hugo (not the movie). Hugo is a static site generator - like Jekyll, written in Go. It's very fast and easy to use, and perfect for personal websites like this one.

Getting Started

First, install Hugo on your system. On macOS, you can use Homebrew:

brew install hugo

On Windows, you can use Chocolatey or download the binary directly from the Hugo releases page.

Creating Your Site

Once Hugo is installed, create a new site:

hugo new site my-portfolio
cd my-portfolio

Choosing a Theme

Hugo has a large collection of themes. You can browse them at themes.gohugo.io. For this site, I used a customized version of a portfolio theme.

Deploying

You can deploy your Hugo site to GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel, or any static hosting service. GitHub Pages is free and works great with Hugo!

Note: This site has since been rebuilt with plain HTML/CSS to look like an operating system. Progress!

How Important Are GCC's Optimization Flags – Loops

While I was learning C++ a few years ago, I read a little about GCC's optimization flags and how they can improve performance. I was curious about how much of a difference they actually made, so I decided to test it out.

The Experiment

I wrote a simple - and kinda useless - program that increments a number in a loop:

int main() {
    long long sum = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000000000; i++) {
        sum += i;
    }
    return sum;
}

Results

The results were quite dramatic:

• No optimization (-O0): ~2.5 seconds
• -O1: ~0.8 seconds
• -O2: ~0.3 seconds
• -O3: ~0.001 seconds (!)

What's Happening?

At -O3, the compiler is smart enough to realize this is just computing a mathematical formula and replaces the entire loop with the closed-form solution: n*(n-1)/2. This is called loop optimization or strength reduction.

The moral: always enable optimizations in production builds, but also understand that sometimes the compiler is smarter than you think!