Web Portfolio

Fri Dec 13 2024

The "Bailey" Website

Finally, a website for me. I'd consider this to be my first "real" personal project considering that all of my other projects were either discontinued or made for class. Not to say that those projects aren't valid, just that this is the first project I feel I can call my own.

Technical Advancements

While this is a relatively simple portfolio (that will be updated as time goes on, don't worry), I made sure to do something new. First of all, this is mainly a front-end project, which I usually never do. Even for my class projects, I usually worked on the backend because there were more than enough people willing to do all the designing for front-end (plus I didn't want to learn Jekyll). To become a real full-stack developer, I have to be able to do everything: back-end, front-end, and dev-ops (dev-ops will also come later). So this project is a way to fill in that missing knowledge.

I used Next.js (React) with Tailwind CSS. So far, Next seems to make sense as a framework without being too wonky. React is pretty simple and is somewhat reminiscent of functional programming (I may write a blog on Haskell one day). And Tailwind CSS is actually pretty convenient because I don't like writing CSS.

I found the underlying philosophy behind front-end to be unique in that it's less focused on processing a lot of data efficiently and more on efficient and modular design of components (which is why React appears to be more functional than JavaScript). It's a nice change of pace from designing API Controllers and Java Entities (having worked in SpringBoot). I wouldn't mind doing it again.

Closing Remarks

There are much better portfolios out there. That's a fact. But I'm not going to keep it that way forever. Expect V2 coming someday. Or some year. For now (since this projects page is looking pretty sparse), I'm gonna be working on more projects. Bye bye.