January 7, 2022
First Post
Hello there!
I've always wanted to build a personal site. As a software engineer, it appealed to me as an interesting technical exercise with a very tangible output. Most of my work experience revolves around mobile applications, so it's a convenient project to diversify my technical knowledge.
I also considered it as an avenue for writing practice. Much of the writing I've done since college has been of the technical sort. I'd like to do more of it outside the scope of my job, and I'd also like to branch out from the engineering mindset. As a fairly private person, this is additionally an exercise to get more comfortable sharing my thoughts in a public forum.
So, I finally decided to start this endeavor, riding the wave of motivation that comes with the turn of the year. My plan for this project is to share random thoughts, stories, and experiences, technical or otherwise. I also want to use this site to showcase some photography, as well as some projects that I deem worthy.
I've spent much more time than anticipated setting up this site and publishing the first post. I must remind myself to fight my perfectionist tendencies, so I will leave this aphorism here:
Technical Details
To wrap up this first post, I wanted to include details around the technical effort and learnings with this project. It's been a fun experience diving into frontend development and deploying a fully featured "modern" website.
The basic infrastructure was largely taken care of by Next.js and Vercel. I was truly impressed by how quick and neat it was to start up and deploy a website. Next.js provides the framework to build a website using React and completely handles bundling the app for deployment. Vercel integrates seamlessly with the Next.js project to deploy the app through their servers. This project is my first direct experience with these tools, and it is clear why they are so popular. For anyone looking to get into frontend development, it's an excellent place to start, especially since it's all free (for hobbyists)!
For the contents of the app, I initially thought to make use of a template or starter, of which there are many available online. However, I ultimately decided to take on the technical challenge of building it out "from scratch" to better understand all the components involved. I used a variety of starters (e.g. blog-starter-typescript and https://github.com/colinhacks/devii) as reference. I'm familiar with TypeScript and the React framework through work, so it was simple enough to build out the components on top of the concept of Next.js pages. For styling, I opted to use tailwindcss because I was drawn to its convenience.
At the time of writing this post, I've developed a simple home page, an about page, and a basic setup to display a list of posts. Next up on the plan of features is to build out the pages to showcase pictures and projects.
I fully intend to achieve my goals with this site, so stay tuned for more content!