Building this website had been fun because, well, there was no pressure for it to be anything. It just had to be something.
This was around the time I left my first job. When I decided to reapply elsewhere I realized I had nothing to show for it in my portfolio, so I figured, how about I create something that shows what I can now do dev-wise?
I wanted one that highlighted my frontend skills. Designing the user experience, wireframing, starting from scratch, employing various tech tools, sourcing data from an external CMS (okay, fine, some backend skills as well), and finally laying it all out in a website and deploying it—these were some of the tasks I did in my past job (probably boils down to just ~30% of my week, though 😅).
It's a website, alright. It's just a matter of What will this website be about?
Having circles of non-tech friends you can consult every now and then for tech reasons is super interesting—they give perspectives beyond the tech hat you often wear. (They were also my beta testers. I love them all.)
I have to give credit where credit is due: Thanks to my college friend Paolo for the random brain fart which I took seriously.
It was pretty easy to build off of this premise because I am a really avid reader since high school. I understand this project reveals my taste in literature (somewhat embarrassingly because it feels like it's a soul-baring activity), but if it gets people to read my favorite books and authors, that would be really cool.
Here is the tech stack involved in this project:
- PWA powered by React via GatsbyJS
- CSS framework by Bulma
- Data source/CMS by Airtable
- Hosting/deployment by Netlify
- Version control by Github
- Assets by Canva
I wrote my whole thought process on developing this project over at Medium.
Thank you for stopping by! I hope Dr Libby's prescriptions do you good 🤓