From Minimal Mistakes to Chirpy: Why I Switched and Never Looked Back

— Me, after one week of customizing Minimal Mistakes

🔧 The Initial Setup: Minimal Mistakes Looked Promising…

Like many developers building a personal portfolio, I started with the popular Minimal Mistakes Jekyll theme. It’s feature-rich, clean, and highly customizable.

But soon after, I hit the wall.

😓 What Went Wrong with Minimal Mistakes

Here’s what I struggled with:

1. 🧩 Too Much Customization Needed

• Wanted a homepage with sections like About, Projects, Blog, and Contact?
  → Had to customize _includes, _layouts, and write custom CSS.
• Any layout tweak broke something else—like the sidebar or ToC.

2. 🧪 Front-End Complexity

• I’m not a frontend expert. I work in DevSecOps, and while I understand HTML/CSS basics, I don’t enjoy tweaking JS libraries or layout files.
• Customizing layouts like single.html or adding a TOC on the right sidebar took hours.

3. 💥 Frequent Compatibility Issues

• Theme updates sometimes conflicted with my setup.
• Ruby and gem dependency mismatches kept breaking local builds.

4. ⌛ Time Drain

• Spent more time debugging UI than writing blog content or sharing DevOps learnings.
• Every visual enhancement became a task.

🚀 The Switch: Discovering Chirpy

I told ChatGPT:

“I want a clean and professional website to showcase my DevSecOps work. I don’t want to waste time on design—I just want to focus on writing blogs and showing projects.”

That’s when I found Chirpy.

Within a day, I:

• Migrated all blog posts ✅
• Set up a tag-based blog index ✅
• Customized logo, sidebar, footer ✅
• Hosted the site on GitHub Pages ✅

It was refreshingly simple.

✅ What Chirpy Got Right

Feature	Minimal Mistakes	Chirpy ✅
Out-of-the-box layout	Basic, needs tweaking	Clean, minimal, blog-focused
TOC support	Custom include needed	Built-in with sticky sidebar
Tags & Categories	Manual + layout setup	Automatically shown per post
Footer & Metadata	Manual editing	Pre-configured & SEO-ready
Deployment on GitHub Pages	Works well	Same, zero extra config
Responsive Design	Needs effort	Already polished
Speed of Setup	Took days	Setup in a day

🐳 Bonus: Setting Up a DevContainer Was a Game Changer

While working on this transition, I wanted to keep my system clean and not mess around with local Ruby versions or Jekyll dependencies. That’s where DevContainers came to the rescue.

🛠️ How I Did It:

• I used VS Code Dev Containers with the official jekyll/jekyll Docker image.
• All I needed was a .devcontainer/devcontainer.json and a Dockerfile.
• Ruby, Bundler, and all Jekyll dependencies were pre-installed inside the container.
• I mounted my project inside it and instantly had a clean, reproducible environment.

💡 Why It Was Worth It:

• 🔄 No Ruby on my host machine—no version conflicts, no gem clutter.
• 🧼 Isolated Dev Environment—I can delete or rebuild my container anytime.
• ⚙️ Consistent Builds—What works in the container will work on CI or another laptop.
• 🐳 Docker-powered DevOps discipline—exactly the mindset I’m growing in.

So even if Chirpy was simpler, having it inside a DevContainer made the entire experience smoother, cleaner, and more DevSecOps-aligned.

🧠 Final Thoughts

After customizing Minimal Mistakes for one full week, I realized:

Chirpy helped me shift my focus back to content and learning.
The DevContainer made sure I didn’t waste time setting up dependencies again and again.

If you’re a DevOps/Cloud/Tech learner looking to showcase your work without UI headaches—
Just go with Chirpy. You’ll thank me later.

Thanks for reading. May you have an easy, quick, and joyful portfolio setup experience with Chirpy.!

🔗 Explore my other blogs at opsbygandal.dev
📁 Check out the GitHub repo [https://github.com/gandalops/portfolio-chirpy]
🔄 Let’s connect on LinkedIn