The Polyglot Developer Has A New Look

Back in 2014 I started The Polyglot Developer on WordPress with the intention of documenting what I learn and helping others in the process. However, back then, it was not called The Polyglot Developer, but instead Nic Raboy’s Code Blog. The blog was later rebranded in early 2016, but the look and feel stayed the same.

I am pleased to announce the new version of The Polyglot Developer and a few important things that have changed with this version 2 release.

So what is different in this new release?

A New Look and Feel

For the longest time (since I started), I had been using the Sparkling theme for WordPress. The Sparkling theme accomplished what I wanted from a functional perspective, but it didn’t really fit with the branding that I wanted.

The new, and hopefully improved look, is a hand-crafted theme that I built with Bootstrap. It uses the same color scheme and branding that appears in the social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook. It also opened the door to letting me print these stunning t-shirts and stickers to distribute to my loyal readers.

If you want one of these shirts, you’ll have to come find me at a local event. Then we’ll have something to talk about!

The new theme, however, was not created for WordPress, which is what I had previously been using up until now.

Dropped WordPress for Static Content Generation with Hugo

WordPress is great! It allows everyone and anyone to start a blog and share something with the world. However, as your page traffic increases, your WordPress performance decreases and becomes significantly more painful to maintain.

Every month, The Polyglot Developer receives more than 200,000 page views. It has always been hosted on Digital Ocean and for the second half of its life, it has had various caching plugins installed. The problem is that it has been incredibly slow, very expensive, and scoring terribly with various page speed tests. I imagine as time passes, things would only get worse.

Hugo, like I wrote about in a previous article, is a static site generator. This means that there is no database interaction, no PHP, and no pre-processing before reaching the client web browser. In short, it means that any website or blog created with Hugo is going to be fast.

Everyone is a Premium Member for Free

If you’re a long-time subscriber of the blog, you’ll know that there was a premium members area where there were paid blog content. It had many subscribers and was doing great, but it didn’t feel right.

For this reason, all previously released premium content is now available for free to everyone. Anyone who was previously a paying member will have their subscriptions canceled.

Going forward, paid content will only consist of courses, books, and similar. However, if you’re feeling generous, please consider donating towards The Polyglot Developer via PayPal or Square Cash. The money goes towards hosting costs and any equipment I need for releasing quality content.

Conclusion

I hope that everyone enjoys the content released on The Polyglot Developer and all of its networks. I spend a lot of time writing about what I learn in hopes that it helps everyone become a better developer.

If you find value in what appears on the site, shoot me a message on Twitter. It means a lot to me when fellow developers tell me that I’ve helped them in some fashion.

Nic Raboy

Nic Raboy is an advocate of modern web and mobile development technologies. He has experience in C#, JavaScript, Golang and a variety of frameworks such as Angular, NativeScript, and Unity. Nic writes about his development experiences related to making web and mobile development easier to understand.