I already had a website, but it was kind of old and extremely bright, even I had to reduce the brightness on my device. Lol.

Another issue was that my old website was initially meant to be a simple portfolio site. After a while, I thought it would be cool to have a blog of my own. I found Hashnode, which has a great interface for writing blogs. The problem was, it looked disconnected from my primary portfolio website. I let it be for a while but always wanted a simple platform that served as a one-stop solution and didn't look disjointed.

Last but not least, I wanted to open-source my projects. This was challenging for me because I am (almost) a self-taught programmer without a mentor (maybe the instructors on YouTube and Udemy were my virtual mentors?), and I'm super scared to put things in the public domain where people can judge me.

How Did I Get Started?

With all these points in mind, I had to pick a tool (I mainly write in JS/TS). I had heard great things about headless CMS, but that would mean hosting it on a cloud provider and dealing with the ambiguity of "is it actually what I see?" So I dropped that idea. Other popular tools like Hashnode and WordPress were also discarded for similar reasons. That's when I thought of using markdown to write and parse into HTML. I know this might not scale, but this is purely for me, and I'm probably not going to write thousands of blogs in the next couple of years.

I saw a brilliant video from Sonny Sangha on how easy it is to get started building a website. I thought, if I'm going to make this open source, why not demonstrate how easy it is to get started via a YouTube video? The video below shows how to build things from scratch.

But This Doesn't Cover the Blog!

To figure out the blog side of the code, I found this course on Udemy by Brad Traversy. The entire source code is available within the course, and it is highly recommended. I mixed and matched elements for the portfolio and blog, and voila! I used a different slider package and adjusted styling for responsiveness, but that's about it.

The entire source code for this website can be found on my GitHub here.

What's Next?

I plan to write at least one blog a week. I procrastinate a lot, so I'm not sure if I will be able to keep up with it, but I promise to try. I will also use my website's GitHub repo to build things. For example, I haven't added any testing to the blog yet, but I will eventually, and I want to document that process in an article. I will also write blogs about SEO, performance, and other relevant metrics. The idea is to show everyone starting out how easy it is to get better at web development.

I am also planning to branch into mobile development and work on a couple of other super interesting projects this year. I'll try to capture all of them in this blog.

Conclusion

Why is the grammar so bad? Generally, I proofread most of the things I write, but this time I want to keep it basic and not worry too much about grammar. Apologies if this is something that bothers you. I hope this exercise will help me organize my thoughts better as I go.

Here is a Markdown Cheatsheet if anyone is interested.