There are plenty of repositories labeled as beginner-friendly, and platforms like First Contributions and For Good First Issue make it easier to find them. But the truth is, good-first-issue is a subjective label — what seems easy to a project maintainer might not be so simple for a newcomer.

Here’s the thing: most developers, myself included, write code before writing documentation — because it’s nearly impossible to do it the other way around. This means maintainers have an intimate understanding of their codebases, while newcomers are often left trying to piece things together. Tasks that seem trivial to seasoned contributors can feel overwhelming to first-timers. As a result, issues marked as good-first-issue often aren’t quite as good or first as they appear. Many new contributors end up sticking to minor documentation edits or typo fixes — or giving up altogether.

So, what’s the best way to make your first open-source code contribution? Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Use open-source software — get familiar with the projects you actually use.
2. Notice bugs or rough edges — the smaller, the better.
3. Fix and contribute — if you can, submit your solution as a pull request.

I started out with a 2-file setup, index.html and style.css. It was understandable as I just learned about web and publishing on GitHub Pages, so the simplest way was the right way.

As I got nearer to the end of my university time, I jumped on the Rust bandwagon and the “build your own” trend, thus leading me to create my own templates to use with Zola. The result? I got the look I wanted that looked like I put the default Ubuntu terminal on the internet, the sections and navigation I imagined and my website built in less than a second.

Zola, in my opinion, is a good product with potential to be great. It allows users full freedom in customizing templates, themes and provides decent functionalities such as feeds and taxonomies. However, it lacks a good default theme, and the biggest pain at the time I used it was SEO. This was expected to be handled by theme creators, and that really hinders its adoption even today.

When choosing the tool for this remake, there were a few criteria that I sought for:

• Stability: Dependability and future-proof tools triumph fancy but unstable ones. I don’t want to suddenly see my site not building because of a SSG has a breaking change.
• Simplicity: There are just enough features that I need, with as few unnecessary decorations as possible.
• Sane defaults: There’s no point reinventing the wheel unless you are hardcore, and that often do not go too well.

Using these criteria, Jekyll was my selection. Its default theme, minima, comes with everything I need, and GitHub Pages does support using a remote theme so I could use v3 without any hassle. From there on, I made some small tweaks to the templates, bolted on Mermaid, MathJax and giscus. That’s it.

After a few years of leaving my website consisting of just 2 files index.html and style.css, together with some miscellanous git files, I made a decision to upgrade it to include different sections and especially, a blog that I can write whenever I like. Obviously, using plain html files for this purpose is an arduous, painstaking task. Therefore I decided to go with an SSG.

Execution

Why I chose Zola

Static site generators have been around for a long time, and there are hundreds of them to choose from. Jamstack has a summary of all available SSGs with details of backend language and templating language.

While I could go with more popular options on the list such as Jekyll or Hugo, I found out Zola is built on Rust, and I can’t stress how much I love it. That said, Zola is not without its downsides, particularly regarding its template language Tera, which does not have editor support as much as other templating languages. However, Zola struck me in terms of simplicity, and its clear documentation shows exactly what needs to be done without all the fuss. That fuss is exactly why, up to now, I still cannot understand Hugo and believe it’s a mess. One more thing, Zola is fast, extremely fast to build. I timed one of the production builds and it took approximately 1 minute for my content to show up.

How I decided the structure of this website

After choosing Zola as the SSG, I need to structure my website around how Zola works. Luckily, this is quite simple, and Zola allows users to freely construct their website, as long as content are stored in the content directory and there is a template to render it in templates directory. Since I want each section and its pages to have their own look, with some shared features. This is easy to do by creating section.html and extends it for a particular section, for example blog.html for blog.

Currently, this website has 3 sections: experience, projects, blog. This is a good split for the content that I currently have, but may change if I need more in the future. I also added tags as a way for readers to filter my blog posts according to tags.

How I settle on the style

The previous version of this website did not look that bad, however I felt it was just a demonstration of Bootstrap. That’s why I wanted to create another look for it and in search of something new, I stumbled on Eliza Weisman’s website and I found her terminal-esque theme pretty exciting, thus I should attempt to make something similar to brush up my frontend skills, which I have barely used for a while.

Since Zola suggests the use of Sass, I had to learn on the go, and currently, lots of my styling perhaps can be done in a simpler, more condensed manner. Right now, I would say that I’m pretty satisfied with the current look.

Conclusion

Reflection

Building my website has been a great joy so far. It’s time-consuming of course, especially creating the dashed <hr>, which was harder than I thought. But I believe that you learn more from the tough moments of life than the easy ones, and I’m certain that I’m gonna go through many ordeals tougher than this in my life.

Future

There are features of Zola that I have not explored such as search and feeds, which I plan to add to this website as soon as I can. In the longer term, I may add some interactions to this website such as typing cd ~/projects will actually take readers to the projects section.

I want to thanks Eliza Weisman for her great website that inspired my design and Christine Dodrill(Xe Iaso) for another wonderful personal website, which influenced some of the customizations. Especially, the use of border as underline is extremely smart. I may also add some AI-generated images to my website soon :).

Updated 2025-10-07: Please note that this post is outdated, as I have since migrated my blog to Jekyll.