My homepage is a static blogish thing, generated with Hugo, which is written on Go. I think Hugo mostly uses Go's html-template function.

My advice to you is actually to make a hugo site first. And then you can dig into hugo's source (it is on github) and see how they are doing it.
Also try to pin down what kind of content you want on the site (blog, screenshots, scripts, tutorials, recepies, photos etc). Don't make the list too long, but not too short either. Then create at least one page/"category" (these never have to become public, you just need them to have something to build with. so don't spend too much time on them in the first stage.). When you have all this it is "easy" to see how the navigation should be done and generated.

Also, you seem to know more then enough about javascript, don't think more about that ;)
Sass or less are nice pre-processors for css that i really recommend (i use sass).

Webdev community is quite large, but try to get knowledge from good sources (books, pdfs), taking random advises and copypasting js solutions from stackoverflow, will not save you anything. And webdev (front/back-whocares-end) is hard, it has a lot of problems you don't encounter in other types of development. You don't know the target. You don't know what hardware, browser, age, gender or anything about your target user. And you are "developing" content and design that will work for them. So limiting your target audience is not a bad idea if it's done the right way. (you write about archaic UNIX stuff, then you don't need to explain where the startbutton is, you don't need to have a flashgame in your banner e.t.c.).

And last, most people spend so much time on the "design" aspects on projects like this, so much that they get tired of it. Content is key to keeping it interesting, both to you and your future visitors. Start with a basic design and "improve" it over time.