About

This is my personal website. It's main purpose is to put myself out there as a developer and to showcase some of the things I work on.

How the site works

As a backend developer, I really didn't know what the best way to get a static site up and running. I experimented with a few things, and eventually settled on the following.

• JS Framework: mithril.js

  • Despite mithril.js being lower on the list of popular frameworks, this package appealed to me after googling something along the lines of "simplest modern js framework". I wanted something that was simple to learn, had an easy approach to state management, and just worked. mithril.js is just that.

• CSS Framework: bootstrap

  • This was a simple choice. I wanted the flexibility to customize colors and layouts, but I also wanted it to have ready-made defaults and be mobile-responsive out of the box. I did try a handful of other CSS libraries, and none of them seemed as easy. Bootstrap may be overkill for this small project, but it saved me a ton of time.

• Bundler: webpack

  • I chose this because I didn't know what else to choose. It works fine. This project is tiny and I have no issues with performance or functionality. That said, after doing some reading on the subject, it seems webpack is out of style and there are better, faster, more modern alternatives available these days. I'll take a look into these if I ever run into problems with webpack. It's given me no grief, so it's fine to stick around for now.

• Hosting: netlify

  • This solution also resulted from a google search akin to "best free static site hosting". I would have to agree. Within a few minutes of creating my account, I had connected my account to this repository, pushed a few buttons, and it was just working.

    Pushes to the main branch of this repository AUTOMATICALLY BUILDS, DEPLOYS, and SERVES my site, all for free. Additionally, you can manage domain names and SSL/TLS certificates right there in your portal. By far, this is the easiest and quickest solution for low-traffic static sites I've ever come across.

    While I considered serving custom containers on AWS/GCP, I didn't want to deal with all that. I wanted to use a consumer-grade product that was just ready to host my code. netlify did just that.

• Storage: AWS

  • I have an AWS account with a read-only public S3 bucket. I dropped some files in there and link to them on the site. No need for anything fancy.

Palm Tree Credits

"Palms" by fryhet licensed CC0: https://opengameart.org/content/palms

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That's really it. It's a simple project.