New Site Fresh Out the Oven

You’d think a “professional” developer would smash out their personal site quick, right?

That’s what I thought when I started rebuilding my site back in December of last year. To my credit it didn’t take that long, I just finished 85% of it then left it for 9 months.

Dev tings amirite? 🤷🏼‍♂️

Though there’s still a lot I’d like to add, today I’m proud to ship my newest major overhaul.

Growing Up 🌳

My life and career have changed a lot since the last iteration of my website in 2012, and since my last blog post in 2014. The old site no longer reflects my current skills or focus as a developer. It’s high time it gets the TLC it deserves.

Then

• Had just graduated university with very little industry experience
• Built up a small portfolio of client work designing and building WordPress websites for local businesses
• Focused mainly on HTML, CSS, PHP and WordPress
• Had just started developing with the Laravel PHP framework

Now

• Have considerably more industry experience as a Software Engineer, Team Lead and Technical Lead
• Spent the last 6 years focused primarily as a Frontend Engineer building JavaScript (and TypeScript) web applications
• Mostly use libraries like React.js and Ember.js
• Still interested in UX but do very little design these days, though I designed this site 💪🏻

Glowing Up 💅🏻

IMO this new website is better in every way.

The content of the home page better reflects my current skills and focus as a Software Engineer. The design is clean and minimal. The layout is optimized for mobile. The reading experience of the blog has been greatly improved. Lighthouse scores have been improved across the board. It’s not built with WordPress 🙌🏻

Old

• Site built with static HTML and some jQuery magic
• Blog built with WordPress
• GoDaddy Domain
• Hosted on MediaTemple VPS
• Self-hosted Roundcube mail server
• Not optimized for mobile

New

• Site and blog built with Gatsby
• Hosted on Netlify
• Email by Google
• GoDaddy Domain
• Optimized for mobile

Now that the site is relaunched I’m looking forward to putting my time into writing more content. Stay posted!