Hello world!

2025-03-21

If you are reading this it means I have published BBG: the Brutalist Blog Generator. This project is a simple static site generator that I built using Swift so I can finally learn the language. I have been wanting to learn Swift for a while now and I thought this would be a fun way to do it.

While I have written some Swift code before, I have never quite gotten deep enough to feel comfortable with it. I kept track of Swift over the years and when Swift 6 was announced, including full static binaries support for Linux, I knew I would eventually give it a try.

Why a static site generator?

While I have never used one myself, it’s a well understood concept and there are many mature implementations out there such as Hugo or Pelican which I could use as a refrerence.

I started writing down ideas and it all started to make sense. I remembered the one and only Motherfucking website. There is also a better one. Oh and there is the best one. Ok, I won’t lie: I can’t write CSS to save my life, so the “brutalist” style was a cop out.

Getting started

Since I knew what I was building, but I wanted to master the tool I thought I’d give AI a try. The idea was simple, break it all down in steps so I could iterate over them with the help of the AI. I didn’t want it to write the whole thing, but rather to help me iterate.

You can actually see how it all started by checking out the commit history, I didn’t skip anything :-)

Small steps

Here was my rough idea for the steps I would take:

• Create the Swift project using the Swift Package Manager

• Use the --tool option so I’d get the basic structure for a CLI app

• Start by implementing a dummy build operation that just parsed a markdown file

• A quick search revealed that swift-markdown was a good candidate for the job since it also had the ability to render the markdown to HTML

• Look into parsing metadata located at the top of the markdown files (I learned this is called “front matter”)

• YAML seemed like the popular choice so I went with that, Yams was the library I picked

• …

The templating engine

Choosing the templating engine was a bit harder. I wanted something akin to Jinja, which I’m familiar with. First I found a Swift implementation of Jinja but it barely had any docs. Another option was Leaf but being somewhat tied to the Vapor app framework didn’t quite convince me. I ended up going with Stencil which has great docs, supports everything I need, but it seems to be not very actively maintained. I truested my gut.

Publishing

I wanted to publish the project as soon as possible, so I could publish its progress in this very blog, built with it. Obviously. Given it’s a blog, I wanted to add RSS support first… So I did, and here we are.

Onward!

There is a lot more to do such as some adding the ability to create pages which are not posts, a builtin dev server, and more. You can check the progress on GitHub. Stay tuned!