This year, one of my personal goals was to revitalise this website and get the source code onto Github.

Historically it has been a blog, and not that anyone’s really noticed, but I haven’t done any blogging lately. While I do want to maintain my blog, and I intend on continuing to post to it, I don’t think it should be the focus of this website anymore.

Moving forward, I want this website to be somewhere:

• I store technical information that I might need to refer to later.
• I can highlight projects I’m working on & try out new ideas.
• I can blog about different topics easily.

This presented a few issues for me with the websites existing setup:

• It was built on WordPress, which I didn’t find very motivating to develop on anymore.
• It was self-hosted on a server that included websites for family & friends. This made me hesitant to install new tools or languages on the server.
• The existing UI/UX of the website didn’t cater to most of what I had in mind.

Naturally, I concluded the best course of action was to start from scratch—the sort of decision you can easily take on a project that’s entirely your own.

I had recently started to use ReactJS on a few projects at Kobas and was enjoying using it, so I decided I would use that for the frontend. I also knew I wanted to utilise some form of auto-deployment for the project, as that makes development much more comfortable.

After several iterations of trying different JAMstack frameworks, I landed on Gatsby hosted on AWS Amplify.

I started the project using the ”Gatsby WordPress starter”, immediately giving me a ReactJS frontend with the data sourced from my existing WordPress instance.

This allowed me to quickly get to a point where I could work on the design using real data and recognise the functionality I needed to code myself. While I did have data sourced from WordPress, I didn’t have a comment system, contact page, search, or sidebar widgets for things like tags/categories.

I needed to decide what I didn’t immediately require, as I wanted to get the new version out as soon as possible. A design I was happy with was the first thing to get added to my MVP list. The sidebar widgets I considered design-related, the website looked bare without them, they went into my MVP list. The contact page also went onto the MVP list, mainly as it was trivial to add utilising getform.io.

I decided that I could live without a comment system, it had never gotten much engagement anyway. I also thought that if I wanted one later, I could use something like Disqus. Adding search functionality seemed the most complex out of the features I was missing, so I didn’t add it to the MVP list.

Over the next few weeks, I worked on the above MVP list. Doing my best to avoid adding more functionality along the way.

Once I was done with the MVP list, I started looking at deployment options. I wanted something I wouldn’t need to spend much time configuring. AWS Amplify fit that requirement. First, I moved my domain over to Route53. Then I pointed Amplify to my Github repository, which automatically picked up the build command in my package.json. So simple!

I’m pretty happy where I’ve got to at this point, any future development I want to do here is much more streamlined for me. More fun stuff to come I hope. 😀

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