Why Restart
The old Five Minutes Forward ran on Gatsby 2.x — a perfectly fine choice in 2020, but by 2026 the React/GraphQL build pipeline felt like unnecessary weight for what’s essentially publishing markdown files. So I’m starting fresh with a simpler stack.
The Stack
Hugo — static site generator. Builds in seconds, outputs pure HTML.
Git → Deploy — write markdown, push, it’s live. That’s the whole workflow.
PaperMod theme — clean, minimal, dark mode included, RSS built in.
The Workflow
The goal is the shortest possible distance from thought to published:
- Think — in Joplin, in conversation with my AI assistant, or just bouncing ideas
- Draft — markdown file in a git repo
- Publish —
git push, auto-deploy via Netlify
The AI assistant (Apprentice, running on OpenClaw) can write posts, manage the repo, and push — meaning publishing can be as simple as saying “write this up and publish it.”
What You’ll Find Here
- Project writeups and post-mortems
- Things I’m learning about automation and AI
- Experiments with UAVs, data science, and tools
- Whatever else feels worth capturing
The name Five Minutes Forward still fits. The idea is the same: make progress, document it, keep moving.