Why Alpha

While writing the previous part, “ Why Hugo,” it was easy to praise Hugo. The benefits are obvious, and more importantly, the whole ecosystem is tested and trusted by an entire community, many of them professionals whose opinions carry weight I can only envy. Nothing I could say would diminish or enhance that.

But now the balance shifts.

Now I have to explain why you should consider my creation, Alpha. And honestly? I can’t. Or rather, I don’t want to “sell” it to you. It’s not widely tested. It hasn’t proven its value yet. And even though I’m its proud “parent”, it feels odd to praise it too much.

So instead of telling you why you should use it, I’ll rather tell you why I created it.

Let’s Recap

If these posts were a TV series, the “Previously on…” would leave us at that moment when I was discovering Hugo. Excited, impressed, and already tinkering. Somewhere in that creative haze, I envisioned a small pet project for my personal writing needs.

A simple theme with a clean UI and great UX, designed only for publishing text.
Of course, Hugo already offers plenty of excellent themes that do exactly that. But for reasons I won’t get into here, I found it simpler to start from scratch, building something designed specifically for my needs and taste.

And so, Alpha was born.
It got its name because like “Άλφα” (the first letter of the Greek alphabet):

• It’s my first Hugo theme.
• It’s built to serve “letters”.
• It was in alpha stage when I named it.

First Steps

While I was developing Alpha, I was continuously impressed by Hugo and how easy it was to create something useful with it and more importantly in a language I had zero experience with. I began to see possibilities and have ideas, like:

Can I make an epub generator with it?

And even if I’m sure I wasn’t the first to think of them, I was impressed by how many things it could be used for (at least in theory) and how easy it was to work with it.

A key turning point came when I tried to explain Hugo and Alpha (still early in development) to a few friends with zero dev experience during a social gathering. And while I didn’t oversimplify anything, they seemed to get it.

That was a lightbulb moment! I realized I could potentially creating not just a personal theme, but something that, with a few adaptations, could become a platform others might use or build upon even though they were novices.

So, I recruit them as testers for a proof-of-concept experiment. To help them do that, I put together a basic guide, that eventually evolved into the, “ From Zero with Zero” tutorial. It helped them build and deploy a Hugo site using Alpha, even though they had never heard terms like Jamstack, Markdown, or TOML.

The experiment turned out to be unexpectedly successful. One of the testers, in fact, found a small template I had written (originally just a dev tool for logging and debugging) particularly useful for working with shortcodes. That simple observation led to the creation of LiVa, a more robust helper for Alpha.

After that small test I decided Alpha might be worth sharing.
Not for devs. Not for pros. But for those who:

• Have zero experience.
• Can spend zero money.
• And just want to write.

From personal to public

There’s a big difference between creating something for yourself and creating something for others, especially if the others are virtually anyone with access to the internet. And while the journey continues I am very happy I have reached this big milestone to introduce you to Alpha.

Alpha, that as it stands now, is still an infant. It has to prove itself, not to me, but to you: The writer, the creator and why not, the developer.

To see its real value, you’ll have to use it. Most of Alpha’s strengths live behind the scenes, not only in what visitors can immediately see.

So now you’re caught up with why I created Alpha. And if you still insist on a reason to use it, I’ll leave you with just this:

No clutter. No fluff. No fuss. Just clear, accessible words.