Why did I build this website?

https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1499750310107-5fef28a66643
Mar 27, 2023

Why did I build this website?

I mean I already had a website, but it was kinda old and also it was super bright, even I had to reduce the brightness on my device. Lol.

The other problem also was when I started my old website it was meant to be a simple portfolio website, but sometime after the build, I thought, it would be cool to have a blog of my own. So I found Hashnode, they have a pretty cool interface to write blogs. The problem now was, it looked disconnected from my primary portfolio website. I just let it be for the time being but always wanted to have a simple platform that served as a one-stop solution which did NOT look disconnected.

Last but not the least, I wanted to open-source my projects. Trust me, this is a very difficult thing for me to do. Mostly because I am (almost) a self-taught programmer without a mentor (maybe the instructors on youtube and Udemy were my virtual mentor?) and I am super scared to put things in public domain where people can judge me.

How did I get started?

With all the above points in mind, I had to pick a tool (I mean, at this point, I mostly write on JS/TS), I had heard great things about headless cms, but that would also mean I had to put it up on some cloud provider and there still could be ambiguity about, "is it actually - I get, what I see ?", so dropped that idea, other popular tools like Hashnode, WordPress, etc also had to be discarded for similar reasons. That's when I taught of using markdown to write and parse to html. I am aware that this might not scale, but this is purely for me, and I am probably not gonna write thousands of blog in the next couple of years.

I saw this brilliant video from Sonny Sangha, on how easy it is to actually get started to build a website. I was like, you know what? if I am anyway going to make this open source, why not demonstrate how easy it is to get started in via a youtube video. The video below is used to build things from scratch.

But this does not have anything about the blog!

Ofcourse, 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 the course itself is highly recommended. I mixed and matched for portfolio and blog, and Voila!. I have used different slider package, and adjusted styling for responsiveness, but that's about it.

The entire source code for this website can be found in my github here.

What next?

I plan to at least write one blog a week, I procrastinate a lot, so I am not sure if I will be able to keep up with it, but I promise to try. I also will try to use my websites github repo to build things. For example, I have not added any testing to the whole blog, and I will eventually and I want to document that out as an article. Will also make a blog about SEO, performance, and other relevant metrics. I mean the idea is to kinda show everyone who is starting out, how easy it is to actually get better with web development.

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

Conclusion

Why is the grammar so bad? Generally, I proof-read most of the things I write, but this time I do want to keep it basic and not worry too much about grammar. Apologies, if this is something that antagonizes you, I am hoping that this exercise will also kind of help me to organize my thoughts better as I go. Here is a cheat sheet if anyone is interested in markdown Markdown Cheatsheet.