Hello!
I did it, I finally updated my personal website. After pondering and attempting for years, I shipped something I will use.
The biggest driver behind this change is that I want to publish more content online and own that content. Ideally I will post articles at a reasonable rate and the content will be valuable. I'll write about programming, travel, and other tid-bits that spark my interest. I'll still publish content on Medium, but I wanted a place that was entirely my own. A place think out loud and stand on my own small podium (so to speak).
What's Changed
If I'm being honest, my last website was next to useless. I had it on my business cards and linked in my social media profiles but there was nothing on the site of value. Employers that hired me did so looking at my LinkedIn profile more than my personal website. So this new site's biggest feature is this blog, hand-baked and customized by myself for myself. Let's talk about that:
The Stack
Since the last iteration of my website I played around with a ton of different ideas for the next one. At times I had written this site in Go (using the Buffalo framework), Node (using express), as an SPA (using Nuxt). I even dabbled with the idea of Statamic, or wordpress (shudders). But I realized what I wanted out of this project was a place to put my ideas, and I wanted it to be EASY, FUN, and PAINLESS.
I built the site with:
- Laravel (Yes, plain old Laravel. Because I love the framework)
- Vue (No Vuex, no SPA, nothing fancy here. Small reusable components when I need them)
- Forge (I've done my fair share of Nginx configs, CI/CD pipelines, SSL certs. No thank you.)
- Linode (Soon I'll have my AWS Associate Engineer cred. But I've been on linode for years and it's cheap. I'll migrate to AWS eventually)
The Result
I have a platform that I can ship new ideas. The easier I can ship new ideas, the easier it is to share. Those are my favorite 2 things about programming. I like to build new things and share what I've built.
Have a look around. Read some of my posts. If I'm interesting enough go give me a follow or shoot me a DM on twitter.
See you soon,
Andy