About The Hydrant

The Hydrant is the home space for me, Brandon Grady. It represents my random musings about things in which I have interest.

Myself, I am a married father of three living in the greater Denver, CO area. I like to brew my own beer, watch movies, officiate high school football games, program stuff using Ruby, Go, and JavaScript. We do a lot of home improvements. My wife and I like to run and try to stay fit. All of this will likely come out in one way or another in these posts.

In the past, my musings have been isolated to those of my family, mainly my children. In this new incarnation, I hope to fold in other content that interests me in hopes of increasing the amount of content I am delivering. Much of it, nay most of it will likely be of little interest to you. I’m not sure I care. I’m not selling ads, I’m not looking to get a job (well, I suppose I would be if it’s interesting and you like something on here) - I’m mainly hoping to provide a little better accounting of my life, particularly in how it relates to my family, and to have an opportunity to play around with some interesting technology at the same time.

Hugo and the Blog platform

My past attempts at blogging utilized public blog platforms, namely Blogspot. It served me well and did everything I really needed it to do. As time went by, my contributions waned and got stale.

At the same time, I’ve been running my own website for a couple of years with content somewhat similar to that which is on the blog. That content has gotten seriously stale!

So I decided to combine the two. Where does Hugo fit into this?

Hugo is a static website engine. For the technically challenged, that means that I can create content in files, run a command, and it will create a website for me. It is a departure from the blog software that I’ve been using in the past. With Blogspot, content was stored on their servers and I edited it using an editor hosted on their website. Traditional blogging platforms mimic that but on your own hardware. I liked this because I could keep all my content on my machine, edit it however I like (I use Atom to edit Markdown files), then run the program to translate that into HTML and upload it to my server. Pretty slick. At some point I will write a blog post on it.