New Blog, Who dis?

Welcome to my brand spanking new blog site! I've been thinking about building one for eons (my previous website was a bit 💩 and just more of a placeholder)

It really didn't show off much about me or anything I'm interested in. I'm hoping this new site will help do that. I've also enjoyed the technical challenge of building it!

A bit about this site

Technically, I wanted to this site to be:

• Speedy / Mostly static
• Easy for me to dump thoughts
• Simple (both technically and visually)

Speedy / Mostly static

I've always been excited about JAMSTACK essentially it's

The modern way to build Websites and Apps that delivers better performance

Digging deeper into this (bearing in mind I've only just dipped my feet into the jamstack world) Jamstack is an architecture that put's static sites first with JavaScript and API's enriching that content.

To take my first steps into this world I went with Gatsby - I'll probably do a post on how I set up this site in detail but for now I'll tell you that gatsby has a redonkulous amount of useful plugins that allow me to transform markdown into static html! 🎉

Easy for me to dump thoughts

Because I've used Gatsby to employ a Jamstack design it's automatically fulfilled my requirement to make it easy to dump new posts and content, I can do what I enjoy, loading up vscode and type away some markdown! 🙂 One day I may throw in a CMS like Statamic but for now this is easy enough

Simple (both technically and visually)

One of the things I consume a stupid amount of time into is CSS - in my day job I deal with bespoke designs that require bespoke and sometimes complicated css - for this, I wanted to make it easy to work with and go with the utility driven framework Tailwind CSS - there's a lot of pro's and cons about using utility classes, most notably your html ends up looking something like this:

<ul class="space-y-4 mx-auto my-10 bg-black py-5 px-6">
  <li>
    <div class="w-64 h-3 bg-gradient-to-br from-fuchsia-500 to-purple-600"></div>
  </li>
  <li>
    <div class="w-56 h-3 bg-gradient-to-br from-fuchsia-500 to-purple-600"></div>
  </li>
  ....
</ul>

You can see, after time and adding more and more classes how the HTML may get really hard to understand. However, I didn't want to immediately reject something like tailwind without having given it a go first. For this site, because I want a simple and uniform style (without spending forever on it), it kinda made sense to go down this route, again, i'll probably do a blog post about my experience using it 🔥

A bit about 2021

You can't ignore that 2020 was a bit of a 💩-fest, I'm not one to dwell on the bad but to keep looking forward to what the year holds, personally 2021 is my year of fitness and music, professionally 2021 is about upping my game and staying up-to-date in the web dev world.

You may notice that I didn't mention any new year's resolutions, instead I've gone with new year themes - whilst having a resolution, such as "i want to read a book every week" sounds enticing, the reality is that it's all too easy to let yourself down when not meeting that goal week in week out. A theme allows me to adapt and apply it to every part of my life as the year progresses - keeps me in check if you will.

For example, my theme "fitness" doesn't mean that I have to go out and run 5k every morning but means when I can, I'll go for a run, or when I'm doing a food shop I'll pick something less crap for myself to eat.

Anyway, enough rambling for now, stay tuned and enjoy this video about new year's themes by CGP Grey on YouTube, maybe you can find your theme too!