So, here we go. After months of delaying this blog, I finally decided to put on my big boy pants to actually get started. Even though this is the last day of break at the time I'm writing this, I still consider it a personal win that I even remembered.
And this is what this blog is going to be about; a list of personal wins, losses, and my various views on tech and whether if french fries really does go with soft serve *cough* you guys know who you are *cough*.
The Tech
Now having no prior experience with maintaining a blog of any sort, I had literally no idea how the hell I should get started. Naturally, I ended up going through a few iterations before I ended up with this.
v1: The Static Site
This is as basic as it gets. In a nutshell, this involves having a one-page layout where new posts were updated manually. The rest of the functionality like filtering posts would just be powered by basic JavaScript or even jQuery.
Why this sucked:
- Posts would have to be written in HTML (nasty)
- The development would be way more tedious
- Not futureproof
v2: Gatsby + React
Now, the other options I considered were using WordPress and Hexo (a blog framework for Node.js). Both are great and all, but WordPress seemed to be a bit too limited in terms of the level of control I have over this and Hexo albeit seemed to fit perfectly for this project, it really was limited to just making blogs without any purpose beyond that.
Then comes Gatsby -- the static site generator, not the one who got shot 😢. Gatsby is powered by React, Webpack and GraphQL under the hood which allows it to be easily converted to a PWA and use a shiny new query language for the backend. Although there is a larger learning curve, this allows developers to easily leverage its expansive library of plugins.
Limitations
As of now, much of the blog is done in terms of features. However, there is still that annoying issue where links won't actually take you to the correct section of the blog.
Coding Problems
What would a tech blog be without any code? In short, I'll include any problems I stumble upon that I find quite interesting. Now I may or may not solve it in the most efficient way, so feel free to drop a more optimized solution in the comments section down below (holy f%ck I sound like a typical YouTuber).
Cool Tech
If there's cool tech out there 👀, I may or may not write about it. In short, I personally believe that WebAssembly will have a great future in terms of highly performant web applications.
Personal Development
Over the past few months, I've decided that I wanted to get my shit together. Don't get me wrong, spending nearly 300 hours nuking other civs to oblivion is fun and all, but sometimes you just gotta put on your big boy pants if you want to reach your goals. I am not a strong proponent of work-life balance, but rather a concept of work-life harmony ooo sounds like a great idea for another blog post.
So before I ramble on, welcome to the blog 😄.