Hello world!

It’s been a while since I’ve had a reason to build a site from scratch. Now, though, it’s late 2022, and I have several reasons!

1. I quit my job a month ago, and it’s time to start looking for a new one. Apparently, employers like to see portfolio sites, and my current one is very outdated.
2. Everything I write on the Internet now lives on someone else’s service. (Occasionally, that someone else is just awful.) I’d like a place to put my thoughts that is at least easily portable.
3. I quit my job a month ago, and I need to make something before I go nuts.

I decided to put together this personal site using Astro, the hot new site generator. It has the feel of making a good old-fashioned PHP site with all of the modern niceties that come along with modern JavaScript tooling and components. So far, it’s been a nice experience.

Astro provides a bunch of sample sites along with links to open each one in an in-browser development environment, so there’s extremely little friction if you want to go kick the tires. I cloned the Just the Basics project and set it up to deploy on Netlify. From there, it was mostly a matter of adding the Tailwind integration and pulling in some Mamba UI components to get things off the ground.

This is my first real experience using Tailwind, and… it’s a rough adjustment. I’m used to systems like Bootstrap and Bulma, so using utility classes for everything feels like thinking backwards. It’s fine for a small project like this, but any sort of large project would require real discipline in order to keep everything consistent. Breaking things out into components helps a lot, at least.

This is also my first experience with Netlify Forms, and it couldn’t have been easier. Just throw a netlify attribute on your <form> element, and it’ll capture the form submissions for you. It even pops up a success message and redirects the user back to the previous page by default.

The next step is to create a blog post list page, then a portfolio section on the main page, then a thousand other improvements. I made the GitHub repository public, so feel free to point and laugh at all the commits that are within a few minutes of each other. (Yes, I forgot the names on the form inputs.)