Hello again.

If you’ve been here before, you’ll know that this site hasn’t been touched in far too long (several years, in fact…). After two or three attempts to redesign and build this thing in various formats and technologies, the time has come to actually put something new out there.

I originally began writing on this site while I was in the midst of my studies at BCIT, learning how all this web design and coding stuff works. Blog posts served as a means of processing what I learned each week - which was a great exercise, as it required understanding the material in order to articulate it in words. Going forward in my career however, I decided that these entries, if somewhat nostalgic for me personally, no longer served me as a web development professional. So, farewell old blog posts!

Even while kicking those old entries to the curb, there were a few that merited sticking around, so I have transferred them here onto version 3.0, which you can find on the blog.

What changed?

With the abundance of tools and the narrowing of my focus as a developer, I decided that it made sense to move away from WordPress for this site and try something new. I didn’t desire a ‘dynamic’ site with a database and admin section for easy content editing - it’s just me here.

So instead, I opted to build this site using Gatsby, which is a static site builder using React. As my development focus has changed more towards JavaScript lately, building a site in React made sense on a number of levels. To further simplify (and reduce spending), I decided to move away from traditinal web hosting through a C-Panel type platform since that was no longer necessary when static site hosting can be easy and free.

I’ve used Surge for a number of small projects in the past, but this time I chose Netlify for its ease of connecting a git repo, build scripts, and the possibility of integrating lambda functions as a future enhancement. They also make static site form submissions easy (and free). Lots of great reasons, really.

What’s next?

Great question. To be honest, I’m not quite sure just yet. I’ve considered putting out tutorials or educational material for web development. There’s already so much material out there to learn from - I have yet to figure how I can contribute in the midst of it all. More than likely, it will have to do with front-end topics, JavaScript, and accessibility since those seem to be the things that I do best.

For now, I will continue tinkering here, and see where it takes me. I have a few enhancements to make here which I will get to as time permits. It’s really nice to have something new in the mean time!