Site 24

The first version of the site was built in 2006 with Flash. The next one was built in a php with a very basic, homemade CMS (this was 2007). Since then, it's mostly been a one-page site with my name on and nothing else. Now we come to 2024. With the goal of writing more about front end development, I'm relaunching my site and the first post will be a little walkthrough of the tech behind it.

The goal is to function as a portfolio and blog, while also being a code playground itself, as opposed to hosting all the content on existing platforms like Medium to dev.to. The repo is here if you're interested.

Choosing the stack

I’m a frontend developer who leans more towards the “front of the front” so the tech stack reflects this, for example, the decision to roll my own CSS instead of using an existing framework.

Next.js is used for building the frontend and is hosted on Vercel. For performance reasons, I wanted to go with a headless CMS, and ended up settling on Storyblok due to its ease of use both as a developer and content writer. 

Behind the scenes, I’m using Storybook to keep track of UI components, especially with visual tests. It’s probably overkill for a site as small as this, but I’ve found it easy to work with and want to use it on all larger projects going forward. 

I’ve also got a little plop script set up which, when run, creates a new folder containing three files for each React component based on a template

• The tsx file containing the component itself 

• An empty scss file

• A stories file

So far, I’m feeling good about how everything’s progressing. Let’s see how this blogging thing goes.