Hello World

I recently decided it was time to invest in my personal portfolio. There is no particular reason, mostly because I wanted to code a bit and this was the perfect motivation. And after some late night sessions, I had something I can be proud of. Something to show the world myself, apart from the social networks like Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. A platform where I do have the control and can add unnecessary features. Additionally, I had the motivation to code again, and it’s a great way to start.

Before I had some attempt where I only used HTML, CSS and some JavaScript. In the process, I focused mostly on design, and then desperately realized that creating Responsive Design using only vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS was more difficult than I had estimated as a cocky beginner. But I dealt with it. I was somewhere very proud of my work, showed it to some developer friends and colleagues, who attested me a relatively acceptable code even for a UX designer, especially since I had apparently never done that before. They probably felt the same excitement as when I am presented with self-made front ends 😉. One colleague proposed me a static site generator named Jekyll, which would suit my needs better than writing everything myself.

So I never released the old work. Fortunately, because I had built-in some security problems, so that my Spotify account could have been controlled from the outside. Anyway. Then I found Astro 🚀.

Rebuilding the website with Astro

If you have never heard of Astro before, it’s essentially a static site generator made to build web apps with less JavaScript. It is an open-source project released under the MIT license and build by the team behind The Astro Technology Company. It can render JavaScript interactive components from a few different frameworks into pre-built HTML pages (it does this with a fantastic tool called Vite, pronounced veet) without any extra JavaScript. So far, so good. For me the most important part was the easy setup, the easy integration of any framework (if I ever want to do that in future) and the easy way to style the UI with tailwind. It’s that package where you don’t mess up anything at the beginning. You can use React, Angular, Svelte, or Vue or together at any point in the project to build a super-fast and SEO-friendly website. Wow! 🥳

• Stying with CSS modules, Sass and Tailwind,
• TypeScript
• MarkdownX
• Pagination
• and even more

It comes with everything needed to build a website without adding or configuring libraries that support the above, a great starter into the world of JAM Stack. The perfect bundle for my needs. I made more progress on a rainy saturday and a half sunday than in all the months with different YouTube, Udemy and Blog Tutorials before. And maybe it’s the right for you too, feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Or take a look in the helpful documentation or join their great discord server. Otherwise, I am sure you will find lots of incredible tutorials at other tech blogs, YouTube or GitHub, you can find the source code of this website there too.

TLDR

• I wanted to develop an all-in-one solution, a mistake. Wanted to create everything by myself. Didn’t want to use libraries. To make a long story short: I made every single mistake of a software development, even though I know better myself and use it every day due to my professional experience.
• To motivate myself to sit in front of my device after 8-9 hours of working is hard sometimes. it has turned out for me that I can work on it better at the weekend or on holidays.
• If there is no motivation, don’t force yourself to continue the work. This caused me to losing motivation. This led to larger pauses between progress, which eventually led to slower progress, which affected motivation…
• Every progress is good progress.
• Just start! 😃