I am a not that old (like pre-php old) programmer. For a personal website, crafting your own static website generator is so easy and fast that I would not even bother reading someone else's documentation.
I also did my own SSG, what it basically does is that it adds header.htm and footer.htm to each file in the folder... I first used server side includes (SSI), but often ended up having to edit all files because I needed to make a change in the SSI code. With the SSG I can just re-generate all files.
This is the way. All I wanted was to be able to write markdown and have it produce an aesthetic that I like. And syntax highlighting of code blocks. Pretty trivial to wire up.