At last! The time has finally come for me to announce the launch of my brand new website! Old friends, coworkers, and past readers may recall my old website that I threw together on SquareSpace (mostly just so I could have something online and start building my brand/audience). Back then, I was working on a 16-part tutorial series about how to build a JackBox.tv clone with Phoenix & React. Around the time that I published Part 11, I hit a massive wall.
You see, the thing about SquareSpace is that its syntax highlighting features didn't support git diffs in code snippets at the time, and git diffs happened to make up a fair portion of my blog posts. In order to work around this, I was forced to embed around one hundred GitHub gists among the 11 articles I had written so far. It wasn't long before my blog articles' loading speed came to a crawl due to all the iframes that had to separately load in on each page. Plus, it was a GIANT headache to edit and keep organized.
Unfortunately for me, the pressure was on. My JackBox blog series started to pick up traction and I began receiving emails from all around the world asking when I intended to finish my blog series. I couldn't muster the energy to put up with a problem that was growing exponentially with every new blog post, so I decided to burn it down and start over. By that, I mean build my own website from scratch (as any proper developer probably should).
However, as the saying goes, the cobbler's always last to get a pair of shoes. I was a bit of a workaholic and usually too mentally exhausted to continue coding in my downtime from work and freelance projects. I began making headway during COVID quarantine and hired an illustrator, Irene Neyman, but then spent 2 years navigating various layoffs and focusing more on my interviews and job candidacies than I did on my website.
The cobbler's always last to get a pair of shoes
Then I hit the web design equivalent of writers block. I've always found it difficult to design for myself, so I hired a web designer this past summer to finish the last remaining web pages. Just as I got the designs delivered, I got laid off AGAIN, and what do you know... after a month or two of recovery, I finally found the time to finish my website.
While I initially started using the Gatsby framework with custom remark plugins up the wazoo, I hopped on the Next.js hype train around 2022. First with the page router, later switching to the app router once it was a bit more stable. Originally, I planned to use Markdown files to write my blog articles in (specifically MDX so I could add custom React components), but switched to using Sanity CMS last summer.
When it came to the frontend design, I was inspired by The Outline's blog design (an organization that has since gone out of business) and knew I wanted to incorporate illustrations of my three pets throughout. I also wanted to add little easter eggs that visitors might not notice at first.
One of my favourite details that I've incorporated in my site are the dark-mode-dependent lighting effects on the illustrations (they're an SVG layer that I turn on and off depending on the theme you've chosen). Using vector graphics also means that I can programmatically change the colours of my hair and clothing to suit my current style or the colour palette of any of my pages. The first version of my illustrations was delivered with my character having purple hair (which was what I sported at the time) but I've since shaved my head and completely regrown my long hair in its natural colour...
There are still a few pages I plan to finish, such as an LMS where I will be posting coding courses for projects that I personally find interesting and exciting. However, I felt that if I waited to officially launch my website until those features were finished, I'd spend another 2 years telling people not to look up the website associated with my email.
If you're interested in taking a peek behind the curtain and checking out how I made all the magic happen, my website is fully open-source. You can find the GitHub repository here.
Lots more coming soon, so stay tuned!