Alpha & Impostorism

Questions filled with doubt came rushing. It lasted only a few seconds, but it was undoubtedly there. You see, it’s been a while since I worked on a project that hasn’t had some kind of peer review. And it doesn’t matter if the feedback is good or bad—another pair of eyes always helps you see things more clearly.

But Alpha wasn’t like that.
Alpha started as a personal project, more like a test case—a proof of concept.
Could I create something with Hugo that wouldn’t fall under the category, “Junior dev with a free afternoon”?

You don’t know what I’m talking about yet, so let’s go back to the beginning to give you some background. From early on, I had a vivid imagination. And since I couldn’t draw a straight line even with a ruler, I started writing to unload all those mental images.

So I wrote. I’m not saying I was some prodigy, or Tolkien. Far from it. But I liked putting words together to make sense of what was lurking in my head.

At some point, my writing moved from notebooks to digital. And eventually, from private to public. And that was satisfying. Words, like imagination, don’t want to stay locked up, they want to escape, and the same way imagination seeks mediums outside the gray matter, words seek readers.

But there’s a crucial difference. In the physical world, you have notebooks. In the digital world, you have Word editors. You have somehow restricted choices and that’s fine.
But once you go public, things get complicated.

You need a platform and that platform will, directly or indirectly, have control over your words. So ideally—like your notebook—you should own the platform.

And sure, there are endless options out there to try and I did that.
I’ve tried many. And each attempt helped me shape a personal checklist:

What I Want and What I Need:

• It should let me write, not troubleshoot.
• I don’t want moving parts. Words are static, they should just stay there.
• I want a clean interface—zero distractions. Words don’t like sharing the spotlight.
• I want it to be accessible by everyone. From people with disabilities to someone using a ten-year-old phone on a 2G connection.
• I want it to be easily customizable.
• I want it to be time-resistant. If it works today, it should work the same forever.
• It shouldn’t cost much, if anything.

Not excessive, right? But those points exclude a lot of “solutions.”

From what was left standing, I picked Hugo (why Hugo? That’s a story for another time).

I got the platform, now I needed a theme to fulfill the rest of my “wants”.

In a world where “simple” is called “minimalistic”, I decided to build my own theme from scratch.
Not because I’m bashing other themes—but because if you want things a certain way, you can’t blame others for not building it your way.

So, after all this, Alpha was born.

At first, it wasn’t meant to be released publicly. It was for internal use.
That actually helped. No need to overthink things!
Until one day, at a casual gathering, I mentioned what I’d been working on. To my surprise, my friends—people not very tech-savvy—got curious.
They wanted to try it.

After some preparation—writing a mini step-by-step guide, adding comments in key files—I sent them alpha.zip.

And all of them, with zero experience and just an email address, managed to create their personal website with Alpha in less than half an hour.
They were excited. Not just because it worked, but because they made it work. Their excitement took me back to the thrill of my very first <h1>Hello World</h1>.

That excitement changed everything. Alpha had to be available for everyone—not just me.

It wasn’t just a personal proof of concept anymore. Now it had to:

• Honor and extend that fourth point on my list: everyone means beginners too,
• Be smarter, with safe fallbacks and functional defaults,
• Be easy to install, easy to update, extremely easy to configure,
• Be loaded with features, at least those that I consider essential.
• Work out of the box,
• And above all, just let them write.

That’s where the difference between a personal project and a public one really shows its teeth.
Now you have to put on your oracle hat and predict every possible user behavior. From a typo or a missing value, to accidentally breaking things.

So Alpha had to be refactored completely.
It went back to alpha version again (that’s one reason for the name) and almost started from scratch.

The theme’s architecture was completely re-imagined. The codebase more than tripled in size, as professional-grade features replaced the initial simple templates.

Some Key Changes:

• Layout sections were removed and replaced with shortcodes for easier custom layouts.
• Extra shortcodes were added to cover more section elements.
• Tailwind integration became optional—only for users wanting to customize further.
• The entire SEO setup was custom-built from the ground up—with safe defaults for beginners, and full overrides for advanced users.
• A helper, LiVa, (Linting Validator) was created. A symbiotic framework that is there from the first preview to help and warn users of anything that could affect their deployed website—from a missing meta description for SEO and quality control of social sharing images to the simplest, a Markdown cheatsheet for users who haven’t used it before.
• Documentation was written to be clear for beginners but still usable as a reference for experts.

So after all that, my original seven points were fulfilled.
And an eighth was added:
Now Alpha isn’t just accessible to readers. It’s accessible to writers.

And yet—even knowing all that and the effort it took to fullfil them—when I pressed that button that marked the official v1.0.0 release, that feeling of impostorism was there. Chipping away at the excitement.

It told me it wasn’t good enough.
It told me I was wasting my time.
It told me to be scared.

Let me be blunt:
Impostor Syndrome is a bitch!

But shipping is the cure.
Releasing this project is not about claiming perfection.
It’s about finishing the work.
It’s about honoring the excitement of those first users and delivering on the promise I made to them and myself.
It’s about putting a stake in the ground and saying, “I built this. I’m proud of it. And it’s for you.”

The doubt doesn’t vanish, but it loses its power when you act in spite of it.

Alpha isn’t just a Hugo theme. It’s my proof of concept.

Proof that anyone with a clear goal and enough stubbornness can create something they believe in.

So that’s my creation. No clutter. No fluff. No fuss.
Just clear, accessible words.