My Personal Site Or - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Static Site
I have waffled on my personal site and gone through several iterations and tech stacks to finally land on something minimal and simple. Doing personal projects in my now very limited free-time since becoming a father has led me to triage problems and prioritize what really matters in a more sensible way. No, I don't need a deep database schema for what amounts to a personal blog. Keeping the simple things simple allows me to dive into more projects that may require more technologies I want to learn and wont become overwhelming.
Leveraging 11ty has helped me get a static site up and running very quickly and I'd like to try it out for more projects going forward, not to mention it's open source. The ability to write a blog post in Markdown with a simple-to-understand frontmatter is a godsend to someone that, like me, doesn't necessarily need or want an admin interface.
I've played around with the goofy visuals of this site for a while. First making a Codepen of the homepage during a lunch break a looong time ago. I still have plans to do a more painted look for aspects of the site and to stretch my vector design legs a bit, creating SVGs for fun and to represent my different projects in process.
The personal posts on this site will be me showcasing things I enjoy working on in my own time while the professional posts will be my upskilling and refreshing my development knowledge for my career growth. I hope to be able to look back through the site and see how I've grown as a developer.
Now let's see how frequently I can keep up with updates...