I decided to teach myself some modern web technologies and put together a static blog based on Gatsby.js.
Who am I?
My name is Anton. I am a professional Android developer. I am going to create a dedicated About page with more information, but for now, I think this is enough.
What will I be blogging about?
I don’t know yet. I think I’ll be posting about my work. But I could also post about some other life stuff. If this thing doesn’t sink, I plan to add Portfolio and CV sections. We’ll see.
Why do I need a blog?
I had a WordPress blog more than six years ago but somehow abandoned it. Although it took quite a bit of effort to publish articles at times, I have to admit results were rather rewarding. I did enjoy sharing my knowledge, and based on comments I received from my old blog, it helped some people.
Of course, there are other ways of sharing knowledge. But throughout my career as a software engineer, I realized that I don’t enjoy making presentations. I usually work on something that I cannot open source on Github. I don’t usually go on meet-ups, etc.
Sharing knowledge is not the only reason why one would want to maintain a blog:
- If a blog focuses on professional matters, it complements the author’s resume. I think that having a blog did help me with landing my first full-time job at a good company.
- Blogs help to organize your thoughts and can also be the channel to express one’s emotions freely.
- To a non-native speaker of English, writing a blog in this language helps to train their writing skills. I remember I did start writing my blog in English for this very reason.
- And you can learn (or reinforce) a bunch of other stuff too. Like HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and some other technologies.
Why don’t I use a blogging platform?
I had experience with WordPress and I can’t complain – everything worked. I’ve also tried to publish a couple of articles on Medium – no problem with that as well. My main motivation for starting a self-hosted static blog is to learn some new things in modern web development.
I realized that over the past 8 years since I did anything for the web, the technologies have made a huge step forward. There is a lot to catch up with and honestly, it’s a bit overwhelming. I will have to make myself not try to eat the whole thing and split the process into bite-sized pieces. So, what do I plan to learn with this new blog?
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First of all, I will need to host this blog somewhere. I don’t really wanna have a personal domain or hosting server at this point. The first thing that comes to my mind is Github Pages. So, if you are reading this in 2021, this is probably where it is hosted.
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I will also have to dive into this static website development thing and Gatsby.js in particular. Right now, a lot is like magic to me. As I add features and improve the design, I will have to learn some javascript and CSS. So, this website will be my main playground.
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Hopefully, I will be able to add content regularly, and because of that, I will need to automate the deployment process. In the beginning, it’s probably going to be just a simple bash script. Then I would need to wrap it into a docker image to make the scrip platform-independent and enable me to deploy the website with the click of a button on Github Actions.
I’ll be posting my journey through these steps in this blog. Stay tuned.