The why

My previous was based on a Bootstrap theme created in a bit of a hurry during a job search about a year back. Like the site you are viewing now, it was a purely a frontend website without any server side code.

Although I think it was 'mostly fine', I decided that it was time to move away from a stack consisting of Jquery,Bootstrap and Sass and do things differently.

During the past year, I got the chance to gain a little experience with React and I decided I wanted my new website to be sort of representing my current perspective of 'good' webdesign.

The how

This website was created using one of 2018's buzzwords JAMstack (Short for the combination of 'Javascript, APIs and Markup ').

In this case, that Jam stack is composed of:

• GatsbyJS (an awesome tool based on ReactJS 💜),
• which uses GraphQL to generate static, 'blazingly fast' websites,
• in combination with styled components 💅 for markup (which, although I'm still figuring it out, is such a nice and clean way of styling websites),
• hosting on Netlify for allowing server side functionalities where necessary,
• and currently using Markdown to actually write content.

Hosting

I used to serve my portfolio website from an S3 bucket on AWS and automatically deployed everytime I pushed something to Gitlab. (which is still a great solution by the way!). But, although a pure frontend website is great for a small portfolio/simple blog, one of their challenges is that some things, simply cannot (or should not) be done without some server(less) components.

A nice example is a contact form, and I never spend the time to set that up on my old website.

Turned out, I did not have to for my new one either! After hearing a lot of good stories about Netlify I tried it out, and amazingly, that contact form was basically working on the first try!

So, although I spent most of my coding-time in python the past few years, I've concluded that frontend development in 2019 can really be great when you're allowed to choose a set of nice tools. Things may not be perfect yet, but its quite easy to feel spoiled as a developer now...

More info

Of course..you're already on this website. But if you would like to have a look under the hood, feel free to check it out on Gitlab.