Welcome to my brand new website!
First of all, thanks for checking out my personal web space 🤗 ! If you are reading this, I'd love to hear about how you've landed on my brand-new website.
Earlier in June (2020), when the Covid-19 pandemic affected my activity, I decided to take down my personal website which was built with VueJs and Bootstrap, with the plan, at that point in time, to re-design it in Figma and quickly re-write it using TailwindCSS and AlpineJS.
In the meanwhile, I've been enroled in a full-time TypeScript bootcamp (I have actually written a full post about that experience), that being the reason behind my choice of using Gatsby for building this website. Not sure how many times I've been rewriting the personal website just to get familiar with some fancy new stack 😄. Sometimes this meant going all the way, and republish the newly created version, some other times, I gave up on the idea of publishing the project, but the process itself was always fun and interesting.
Why redesigning?
Here's what I thought it was important to be changed:
- It was only one page
- It was mostly describing my skills as a shipbuilding engineer
- It was lacking a portfolio section
- I was not considering writing a blog before
Here's what I had in mind for the new version:
- Showcase my soft skills and personality
- Showcase side projects I've been working on
- Start building up a list of certifications (like Udemy courses)
- Markdown-powered blog & content (this website uses MDX)
- Syntax highlighting in posts
- Table of contents in blog posts
- Faster loading times, better optimized pages
What's next?
Because I really wanted to start this project from absolute scratch and not use the existing Gatsby starting templates, the goal of lunching the website on January 1st 2021, will probably mean that I'll have to give up to some of the features I had in mind, for the time being. And just to make it perfectly clear, I have no issues with the starter templates, on the contrary, I think they're great, together with all the Gatsby plugins out there, make the development process nice and easy. The reason I decided to start from scratch was the desire to learn the framework and better understand what goes where. Here's what I'll be "cooking" next for this website:
- Dark mode - which is a breeze with TailwindCSS 2.0+
- Adding sounds - I've been inspired by Joshua Comeau's website
- Creating a nice SVG animation
- Better overall design (UI / UX) and visual identity
- Adding a table of contents to the blog posts for easier navigation
- Adding the posibility to subscribe to a newsletter
And, the biggest challenge, probably, will be to build a solid portfolio. For that I'm also considering the idea of creating some live screencasts, but not without having some audience. So, make sure you check back in regularily, if you want to see those new features or other updates.