Last Time
During my time at university, I think the summer just after the first lockdown began in 2020, was the last time I rebuilt my website. Crazy. 3 years ago.
The intention and motivation behind that build was the uni course required us to do these projects throughout each semester and submit them at the end through a big write up on our websites. It was clever really. First year all our sites were just hand written HTML, CSS & JS (if we were fancy). So when the end of semester came around and submissions loomed over us, everyone would panic and struggle. Diving back into our IDEs and writing everything up in HTML.
This was ingeniuous on the course's behalf. It boxed us into this immense frustration and curiosity, forcing us to ask "there must be a better way?". Having just balanced numerous big projects throughout the semester and wanting to then just get in the end zone and smash out the write up, needing to simultanteously think about design, structure, styling, accessibility, page speeds, the code as well as the quality of what you were actually writting made the process so much longer than it needed to be.
Thus, the endless time during lockdown was a perfect opportunity to rebuild my website around a CMS. I don't need to explain what a CMS is to you lot but it would mean when it came to submission I could just focus on the content as opposed to creating more HTML pages.
The Tech
I decided to make it serverless, hosting it statically on a Netlify CDN. My frontend technology of choice was Gatsby while the CMS was Prismic.
This Time
There was a few reasons why I decided to rebuild and make this website you're on now:
- To learn some new stuff
- Flexibility
- What it means to be a developer
To learn new stuff - One of these being AWS, and in order to get a better understanding what better way to get stuck in and build something, eh?
Flexibility - With the previous setup I had Gatsby and the CMS configured to have 2 models: a blog and projects. All the other pages were then hard coded in Gatsby. This worked well up until a point but I really wanted to have the ability to create whatever page I wanted, at any height in the hierarchy right within the CMS.
I wanted this rebuild to embody that message. I'd been exposed to this idea of a monorepo and loved the idea of it, a central place to create a catalogue of microservices, utilities, a design system, a website and a series of apps. To be able to create whatever I wanted.