I built this website in 2 days using 11ty. I want to add all of the major projects I've finished to the portfolio, and start blogging on whatever I'm learning daily.
Hello, world!
I've recently begun my job search to find work after I graduate from NUS. One thing I realized was that a lot of job applications had a space for a personal website, something which I'd always meant to build but never set myself to doing it. And, while I'm not sure if most recruiters or hiring managers are looking through this (hello if that's you, and thank you for taking the time to read this), now seemed as good a time as ever to get started building one.
This website is powered by 11ty, which is an fun, excellent, and insanely expressive static website generator built in Node. I've worked with it prior to this to build a few prototype websites, but never launched anything serious with it until now.
While there are drawbacks to writing a static site (each update requires me to recompile the site entirely, thank goodness it's all handled by Netlify), things are often a lot simpler compared to the full stack projects I've worked on. Oftentimes I have to remind myself to stop overengineering things because it'll all get compiled down to static HTML anyways.
Even though I've used TailwindCSS or Bulma for every serious web project I've worked on recently, I decided to switch to Sass for this website. Why? Because frameworks like Bulma make every website made with it look roughly the same, and I realized that I don't use Tailwind in a very sustainable way. There's only so many files I can open with 10+ class names per line (most of them copied from other elements, mind you) before I go crazy. So, I switched to writing my styles using Sass and I have to say, it's growing on me. At one point in time, learning all the CSS properties seemed like a daunting task, but at this point, I just have to recall what property the magic Tailwind classes I used to use actually refer to.
The only other tool I'm using so far is Anime.js for the front page animation, which is arguably overkill but I may use it for future features of the website as well. On the other hand, I don't like professional websites which basically transfigure themselves when I so much as breathe on the scrollwheel, so I'll probably still be keeping the animations light.
I want to build out this website to eventually include all the meaningful projects I've worked on before. I also want to begin writing a daily blog on the software I'm working on or the new cybersecurity topics I'm learning.
So far, in two days, I've written a pretty good-looking (by my standards) and useful website. It's got a dynamic landing page, all my links, and eventually the portfolio should be filled out once I get the time to do write-ups for all of my many projects. Whether or not it'll be useful in landing a job has yet to be seen, but I enjoyed the process and it feels good to have an online presense beyond the standard GitHub profile or LinkedIn page.