Welcome!

Hi, there - welcome to my new personal site. It is super fast, offers offline viewing, and includes updates from my Software Engineering journey and life!

Enjoy!

Why the New Site?

It’s time-consuming to create a new site right? Yes. It is also really exciting to do something new in a technology you don’t know much about.

Here are a few other reasons why I decided to change up my platform.

Performance

My old site design was created using WordPress, and on the first load of the home page, readers were required to wait 12 seconds. That just didn’t do for me.

I went with a static site generator to change that, with load times under 3 seconds with my testing so far.

Over the next few weeks, as I learn even more about Gatsby, this will continue to improve!

React & Gatsby

We currently use Polymer as our javascript library of choice with Predix at work, while some teams use VueJs instead. With a desire to keep my skillset growing, React with a static site generator made sense as my intro into the most popular library to date.

This site will give me experience with Markdown, React, and static site generators - three important skillsets with a web dev career at the moment.

Gatsby has many quick and easy starter packers, and for a small blog/portfolio site like mine, the limitations it has won’t bother me.

Material Design

With the Googlez upgrading material design this year and being a huge fan, I wanted to stay updated through this side project with their new design specifications.

I decided to use the react-md framework for now, but plan to begin creating my own components from scratch with styled-components in the future!

Free99

Would you believe me if I told that I paid Dreamhost 120 a year for shared hosting for my old WordPress site?

Well not anymore! Thanks to being a little tech-savvy, I won’t be needing the WordPress admin screen or the ease it provides to managing a blog.

Gatsby and Netlify offer generous free tiers, and my site will be running for free from now on 🚀.

Markdown and Netlify CMS

I will be writing blog posts utilizing the Netlify CMS that easily integrates with Gatsby while utilizing Markdown for new articles!

It all just works!!

What’s next?

We’re only at the beginning!

Old Posts

For my initial migration and site launch, I decided to start with the main content and pages, then move on to blog posts.

I only have ~30 posts from the past, so I’ll gradually be moving them over one at a time.

This will require some tinkering with Gatsby and Netlify CMS (or Contentful), so more to come here!

New Pages

I’ll be updating the dev resources and services page soon as well! Totally looking forward to sharing the process I use, extensions for VS Code I recommend, and productivity hacks to help make you a more productive developer.

Portfolio & Site Design

My portfolio page and site design, in general, will be constantly changing on you, because it is my new playground to try out new design ideas, make new React components, and learn CSS animations!

Looking forward to sharing the journey with you all!

Other Updates

This quarter has been a bit travel heavy, so I didn’t follow through on my original training plan.

Instead, I decided to do training on Gatsby and Figma, after finishing React, to help me with my future projects.

Secondly, I created a PWA for my girlfriend to celebrate our anniversary. There will be a new post about that soon for sure!

Lastly, it is summertime!! I won’t be on my personal computer near as much during the next few months. I’ll be hiking, swimming, and reading while enjoying the sunshine instead.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!!