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On-going Portfolio Update

I don’t know where it comes from, but any time I think “I should blog about that” it’s quickly followed by, “I should actually redo my entire portfolio, finally add case studies, and use a completely different technology stack”. I feel like I’m not alone in that sentiment and its SO unnecessary, but it’s there.

Well I’m going to do something about, and that something is blogging about me transforming the portfolio. There are so many cool and interesting technologies in the front-end space now that I think its high time I start playing around with them. Theres a ton of decisions to make along the way but I’m going to start with creating an actual CMS rather than markdown files.

A CMS will make me write blog posts right?

I’ve been meaning to look into Netlify CMS. In my mind, creating a space to write thats not in code will ideally inspire me to write more. Now this is super unlikely, but right now I’m feeling it. So thats what I did! I went ahead and integrated Netlify with my existing set up on GitHub pages. My next steps are definitely going to start migrating the actual “hosting” to Netlify because of how AWESOME the tooling is, but this is the first step.

Do I have an “End Goal”?

Not really, but I would like a “fancier stack”, and a place for me to just write, not look at the code that supports this portfolio (this immediately makes me want to redo everything or just ignore what I wanted to write about). There are some things I’d definitely like to accomplish:

  • Use either Gatsby or Eleventy as a static site generator
    • This site is currently Jekyll based which is great, but I want to use the cool new shiny stuff!
  • Actual case studies
    • This is something I’ve said forever, but its so rewarding seeing other developers will well written problem/ solution based case studies and the actual work that went into it

Along the way updating the design and using cool new APIs like native lazy loading (are you _kidding_ me?!) and really fine tune the performance.

Is this a good idea?

Probably not! I think its super unhealthy behavior to think about a portfolio this much that gets zero traffic and especially when you’re not looking for a job, but I really admire when I see developers with fancy/ up to date websites. I‘ll be creating new posts as this continues and get into more technical parts as they come up. Its an opportunity to “learn out loud”!