add: fireside talk blog

site/content/posts/fireside_anna.md

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+---
+title: Presenting anna at fireside
+date: 2024-04-03
+type: post
+description: Building a static site generator in Go
+draft: false
+tags:
+  - acm
+  - hsp
+  - go
+  - tech
+  - talk
+---
+
+<i>Presented and written by Adhesh, Anirudh, Aditya and Nathan</i>
+
+Building personal blogs from the ground up can be a tedious process. Some of us have had our hands deep in vanilla HTML and CSS, which isn't fun to maintain.
+We all want to get to the point and share our thoughts on the web. But, there is a small bump that stops us from doing so
+
+Maintaining your personal site is like working with your own Neovim configuration. Every issue fixed would lead to an entirely unrelated bug.
+There is a lot of time spent in fixing things rather than getting productive work done.
+
+A static site generator is an immensely useful application. It can simplify the whole process, allowing you to spend time and energy on quality content.
+
+There are several amazing SSGs out there, like [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) and [11ty](https://www.11ty.dev/). Building your own SSG is an amazing learning experience. It also motivates one to maintain and improve their personal site.
+
+## Introduction
+
+ACM-PESUECC conducts the ACM Industrial Experience Program(AIEP), an annual program that spans six weeks.
+It involves students working as a team to develop an industrial level project.
+AIEP intends to give students hands-on experience with real-world projects. It is an excellent opportunity to interact with like-minded individuals.
+
+Our AIEP team consisted of [Adhesh](https://github.com/DedLad), [Aditya](https://github.com/bwaklog), [Nathan](https://github.com/polarhive) and [Anirudh](https://github.com/anirudhsudhir).
+Our mentors (.... cool ass senior names) gave us some great ideas for a team of us four freshers. We were puzzled whether to build a distributed postgres clone, or a load balancer. Deep discussions over a week got us to the topic of making blog sites and how tiring it is to work with.
+
+This and inspirations from [Saaru](https://github.com/anirudhRowjee/saaru) and [Sapling](https://github.com/NavinShrinivas/sapling) pushed us to tackle this problem with our own SSG.
+
+```text
+    ___
+   /   |  ____  ____  ____ _
+  / /| | / __ \/ __ \/ __ `/
+ / ___ |/ / / / / / / /_/ /
+/_/  |_/_/ /_/_/ /_/\__,_/
+
+A static site generator in go
+```
+
+## The small but big decision
+
+Anna is written in Go. We considered writing it in Rust, but that came with a steep learning curve.
+Go is a powerful language and has excellent concurrency support, which suited our requirements to build a performant application.
+
+## Whats in the name
+
+Probably the first thing that us four came accross when joining ACM and HSP was the famous Saaru repository.
+[Saaru](https://github.com/anirudhRowjee/saaru), one of the projects that inspired our ssg, is derived from a [Kannada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kannada) word.
+Saaru is a thin lentil soup, usually served with rice.
+
+In Kannada, rice is referred to as 'anna'(ಅನ್ನ) pronounced as <i>/ɐnːɐ/</i>
+
+## Genesis
+
+We began the project in a unique manner, with each of us creating our own prototype of the SSG. This was done to familiarise everyone with the Go toolchain.
+
+The first version of the SSG did just three things.
+It rendered markdown(stored in files in a content folder in the project directory) to HTML. This HTML was injected into a layout.html file and served over a local web server.
+
+## Whats unique / what made us want to develop this to a great extent
+
+- Beginner-friendly : Wizard, easy layouts, etc. We want the process of typing out a blog and putting it up on your site to be short and simple.
+- Speed : Be fast(hugo,written in Go, is remarkably fast)
+- Maintainable : This ssg will be used by us, hence should be easy to fix bugs and add new features
+
+## What is our goal / benchmark
+
+In simple terms, to beat Saaru's render time.
+Something you probably never notice while deploying, but it is what pushed us to spend hours on this
+
+## A big rewrite (when we went for a TDD approach)
+
+Starting off this project, we kept adding functionailty without optimisation.