Internationalization and Connection

Published on August 30, 2021

A few years ago I came across a text by Gabs Ferreira talking about the need for content production in Portuguese, not only in the IT area, but especially in it.

(go read the whole thing. It’s a good text)

I know I’m not a big content producer, a famous blogger, or a relevant figure in any way in the community, but that post resonated with me. While one of the goals of maintaining a blog in English is to keep the language sharp and actually learn to build ideas directly in another language, how much do I limit the reach of ideas (which are the main objective of this “communication” thing) by making the decision to ONLY write in English? Of course, in English you write for the whole world, but many of the people who could really benefit from or connect with me are from my country, and many of them don’t speak English. Worse, why keep it in one language only when I can simply write in both languages?

Therefore, from today, all pages here will have both versions: English and Portuguese. I also translated the history of the blog, so all posts are in both languages. You can change the language by clicking the link at the top of the page (“en” to go to english, and “pt-br” to go to portuguese).

I had already decided to go down this path for a while, but some technical setbacks slowed me down: last year I started playing with Jekyll plugins to generate content in two languages here, but it was a lot of work and I ended up migrating everything to Hugo who has native support for internationalization. And as I was already migrating from a website generator, I took the opportunity to change the theme for a friendlier and less tedious one.

We move on. Now bilingual.