How I got here
I’ve been a web developer for 5 years now. It’s been non-stop learning in a field that grows and changes at a famous pace. For a while I’ve wanted to have my own site. I think it makes a good impression for a web developer to have a site.
I’ve had my own site before, which was hosted on digital ocean with a custom front-end. It was alright but I didn’t have the time that it took to implement everything I wanted. I was also a lot less experienced back then. It eventually stagnated so I just took it down.
A year ago, I decided to give it a try again, so I used create-react-app to get going. It was fine, but again, I didn’t really have the time it took to build everything I wanted. I also wanted to play around with other things in my spare time. I stopped working on it. Something was still missing.
A few months ago I discovered the Syntax.fm podcast and listened to a great episode where they were praising Gatsby and Netlify. These things seemed cool so I decided to give them a try. One big selling point for me was how they kept emphasizing the value of using services instead of making everything your self.
Finally! I found the sweet spot that worked for me.
I used a Gatsby Starter and hit the ground running. Setting it up on Netlify was ridiculously easy and their free-tier is very generous. I’ve got all my needs covered and I’m not paying for anything other than my domain name! Here’s the specific starter that I used: Lumen.
Digging through the starter kit was enlightening. I learned about a bunch of development tools I hadn’t used before.
Here are a few:
- Automate the process of keeping your dependencies up to date with Renovate Bot
- Have robots review your code with Codacy
- Integrate code coverage reports into your CI with the help of CodeCov
- Learn more than you could ever want to know about licenses with Fossa
Gatsby is too large to cover how much value it provides, especially through its excellent plugin library. It’s a static site generator with the cool things going on: React, GraphQL, and plugins. Let’s just say it’s the real MVP.
Except we have to count Netlify, who is also the real MVP. So we have two real MVP’s. Netlify is a static site hosting platform with an incredibly generous free-tier. Deploy previews and netlify-cms are a big piece of the wonderful pie.
Where I’m at
The site is up. I am very happy with it. I’m going to focus on other goals I’ve had. This is a blog and a blog needs content. I need to do other things in order to end up with content, so I’m being motivated to do other stuff, by this site.
I recently had a discussion with my wife and it helped me remember that doing creative stuff is basically the only thing that I want. So I hope I keep doing creative stuff for a while.
Where I plan to go
I’ll keep building web stuff, and if I think it’s interesting, I’ll make posts about those projects. I’ll probably even make a post about my (easy) process making this site.
Sometimes a situation happens and a comic idea pops into my head; so maybe I’ll draw an occasional comic. I love drawing and sometimes I actually even do it, so some drawings could appear. Those will probably be vector art or pixel art.
I’d also like to write about what I love in certain games. I think I could do a decent job of exploring the systems that make me become addicted to games. I’d enjoy making diagrams and breakdowns of those systems. Most of the time when I think of a game, I don’t picture the characters or the world. I just picture the talent trees, the skill trees, the classes, the races, etc.
Perhaps, most important of all, I might play around with making my own little game. I’ve always wanted to make a game. Game development is the real reason I chose computer science, although I’m not disappointed that I didn’t end up doing it for a living.
Let’s hope I keep doing creative things because it makes me happy!