What I’m Doing Now
Kip Landergren
(Updated: )
Contents
Building Välla
This site is built with a static site generator implemented as a custom gazelle rule set I am calling “välla”[^1].
It’s goals are:
- portable, isolated, and easy-to-author content
- fast incremental rebuilds
- to consider compressed outputs—like gzipped and brotli’d .html files—as part of the build (and to not rebuild them if you don’t have to!)
- parity between local webserver and live webserver
- remove Docker from the deployment pipeline
All of the build-related qualities are provided by bazel and the challenge was just wiring them together with välla. The end result is the site you read here!
[^1]: I originally chose this as it popped up as a Swedish translation of the world “weld” (as in, “weld together”). My thinking was that if I am going to take thousands and thousands of files and bring them together into a single coherent website, the name should represent that. And sound cool. On closer inspection though it appears that usage is very rare and the more common translation is roughly “to herd sheep”! Both allusions are appropriate :)