During my senior year of high school, I took the time to learn web development, and I wrote my first personal website. I used Jekyll and Github Pages to host this site. I’ve used that site throughout college as a place for posting projects and social media links. For several years the site remained largely unchanged, and it received only occasional updates to tweak the projects list. It’s now 2024. I have had some spare time the past few weeks, and I decided that it was time to revisit my personal website.
Firstly, I knew that I wanted to redesign the site. I’ve grown significantly as a developer since high school. I wanted to use my new knowledge to design a site that looked more up-to-date and could grow with me over the next few years.
I also wanted to incorporate some newer technologies. I had used Astro and TailwindCSS last year to design a new website for a student organization called Badger Spill. The DX of these tools was fantastic. I appreciated that Tailwind provided built-in design tokens and typography presets. This removed the guesswork of finding complimentary sizes, spacings, and colors. By colocating my styles with my markup, I also reduced the amount of context-switching while developing my site. Astro made it easy to write a static site, and its templating language was instantly familiar as a React developer. Astro’s familiarity, strong community, and its unique islands feature (for adding interactivity with minimal JS) made it a no-brainer as the static site generator to use.
With my tools chosen, I worked on a design and started typing away. I’m very pleased with how the site turned out. It should be significantly more maintainable than my previous site, and the blog page will serve as a place where I can share notes and findings with the broader developer community.