This Website Looks a Little Different
Several years ago, I set out to put all of the web development skills I had acquired at the time into building a personal portfolio website from scratch. Wait… that sounds familiar. In 2020, I migrated my website over to a slightly modified Jekyll theme, with a note acknowledging that it was meant to be temporary. At the time, three years had past since I launched the first iteration of my website, and I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with it, to the point where I put up a temporary facade just to get rid of it. Another three years later, that temporary has finally come to an end.
Ironically, I took down my old site because I wanted it to be more, but as a result, I ended up making it less. I don’t mean less in design or content. Ashish’s theme is great, otherwise I wouldn’t have chosen it in the first place. But it was less a reflection of me. My intention from the get-go was for my personal website to be built “from scratch” to showcase my talents. Sure, that’s a rather arbitrary requirement, but it gave me a sense of accomplishment. So having a website that was built off of someone else’s theme never sat right with me. However, the one thing I did learn from all this time on Jekyll was that having a conglomeration of different technology wasn’t necessarily the best way to show off what I can do. Can I build a backend API on .NET and PostgreSQL, managed through a custom CMS? Yes. Is anyone ever going to see it? No. And as it turns out, I actually rather liked Jekyll’s approach of content being managed through static Markdown files.
With that in mind, I approached this next iteration with a slightly different mindset. Rather than treating this website as a live resume/portfolio, I want to use it as a sandbox. I want this to be the place where I let my brain explode onto a canvas. Just like the way I had always intended.
So what kind of tech stack am I using now?
That’s it. Well, if you want to get technical, it’s SvelteKit using TypeScript and SCSS, but everything I used was readily available within the SvelteKit environment. For hosting, I switched over to Netlify, since GitHub Pages does not support the dynamic features I’m using. I referenced Josh Collinsworth’s post on setting up a Markdown blog in Svelte pretty heavily, so I won’t be going into too much detail. Check out his post if you’re interested in setting one up yourself.
Let’s see if this one lasts more than three years. 😉