Personal Website
Purpose
It is the right of passage for any software engineer to make their own website. Since college, there has been a few iterations of my personal website, mainly to host my resume and previous projects. As I have been looking into other portfolio/personal websites to research, I found a community of people on the indieweb who invest their time into making their site a reflection of who they are and what they consume. I want this to be more than a place to send recruiters. My goal is to aggregate all of my work, knowledge, and special interests into a single digital space that I would feel proud to share with anyone.
How It's Made
Over the years I have become very familiar with react and hoped to extend my knowledge with a new framework. Through my research, Gatsby and Next.JS seemed to have fit the bill for my purposes. Next.JS had more features like the ability to have both Server and Client Side Rendering so I dove in head first. So far, routing makes much more sense to me and I enjoy the file structure.
My main goal was to make updating the content for the site as easy as possible. Coincidentally, I had started my own Obsidian Vault around the same time I started reworking the site and didn't realize I could leverage Markdown files as the content source. I was digging through the codebase for Tania Rascia's website when I saw this being used for the first time. She uses Gatsby, however, I liked how she had a separate repo for her notes that was a submodule within her main website repo. I had to do the same. The only minor inconvenience with updating the content is that I need to update the commit reference to the notes repo. Luckily, this npm script makes that a bit easier. For the time being, this is going to be the stack for this site
What's Next?
I want to make sure that whoever visits this can get a good sense of my style so my work moving forward will be on the styling and overall feel for the site. I would like to start a personal blog, but I don't think I'm in the right stage to be trying to write more than I should be. I'm going to keep researching to see how other people structure their own blogs to see what will work for me. I would also like to add a gallery for any photos I take to be displayed. It would be amazing to have a microservice that would allow me to upload photos from my phone to automatically populate the gallery. We'll see what I have time for.