A Fresh Coat of Paint

web developer, developer, freelance, react, redux, node, javascript, css, html, ruby, rails, postgresql, mongodb, gatsby, graphql, gql, software engineer
Photo by Christopher Gower via Unsplash

Starting off 2020 with a refresh of my personal site. Overall, the design is mostly the same. I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination but the site is, hopefully, a good representation of my work and my personality.

The Stack

This is a development blog after all, so let's talk stack. I had used Gatsby on a bunch of side projects and my old portfolio used the original version of Gatsby. I wanted to upgrade to the latest and greatest. My old blog also existed on a separate repo and was an old Jekyll setup, which I wasn't a huge fan of. Customizing it was a bit of a pain and I didn't like managing two separate ecosystems.

So, I wanted to shift everything onto Gatsby and maintain the easy authoring experience for me as writing my posts in Markdown can be done ANYWHERE–especially with GitHub's UI. I started off with a fantastic starter project by Robin Wieruch - gatsby-mdx-blog-starter. From there, I ported over everything from my old site–including a few custom gatsby-node-plugin scripts to push Projects to their own custom page templates.

Apart from a few bumps in the road with merging two conflicting createNode and createPage scripts, everything went fairly smoothly. Now, everything is running on the latest and greatest.

What Next?

As I say every year, I wanted to make this easier to manage with the goal of publishing content more often. Let's hope I stick to my goal this year.

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