A New Site for a New Decade

Back on the Blog Train

One of the trickiest balancing acts I've found in building your career is acknowledging difficulties without letting those difficulties define you. Perserverance, too, seems like a necessary aspect of that effort. The outcome of both of those things for me has been: having 2 kids under 2 makes it awfully hard to keep up a blog practice. But with a new decade upon us, it's important to make the effort. We all have to start somewhere.

"Simplify" - a Mantra for a New Decade

This is the third incarnation of my portolio/blog site. Each version has been a reimagination of the last, with an effort to include some of the most recent technologies I encounter in my day-to-day development work. It began with a Bootstrap extravaganza in 2013:

In 2014, I pushed myself to roll my own media queries, with a more nuanced design:

For 2019, I knew I wanted a cleaner, simpler, content-driven design. This has always been a personal challenge for me - I tend to keep adding stuff, but over the years I've learned more and more the importance of simplicity, both in design and development. It's a difficult target to shoot for, both in design and coding, but is certainly worth the effort.

Jekyll to Gatsby and the Rise of the Jamstack

My initial blog was built with Jekyll in 2014. Maybe it was just my professional bubble, but I felt like EVERYBODY was into Ruby at the time. I was trying to move into the world of Ruby on Rails, and spent a fair amount of time with other technologies that incorporated Ruby, including Jekyll. Static Site Generators were also making a splash, with an almost nostalgic appeal to the simplicity of a website based only on static assets, where dynamic content is incorporated at "build" time. Plus, Jekyll working with Github Pages seemed like the perfect match for actually getting development work out there for others to see (and it's free!). These factors got me really hooked, and I eventually used Jekyll to replace my static HTML portfolio page on Github Pages AND build the first iteration of my Mom's Astrology E-Commerce site, The Celestial Loom

In 2016, I started using React at work and fell completely in love with it, and it's been the main channel of my development practice since. So, when I discovered Gatsby in 2018, a static-site generator using React, I was instantly intrigued. As it turned out, an entire community and tech stack had been growing: the Jamstack

Explanatory Gatsby Diagram (taken from Kyle Mathews' post on Github):

I jumped right in to this new stack and ended up rebuilding The Celestial Loom using Gatsby and other Jamstack tools like Netlify and Snipcart. After spending a good chunk of 2019 working on this effort, and after a successful relaunch, I was finally able to end the year with an update to my personal blog as well. And so here we are.

A commitment to Practice

Part of the fun of reworking a blog is riding the enthusiasm wave to make yourself actually write more posts. I'm hoping I'll be able to do so in the coming year!