Hey fellows! Today I want to talk a bit about the technologies I used behind my blog!
So after I've decided to create my own blog because I'm a very communicative person, there was still one question in the room:
What are my technologies of choice for this job?
If you also like to program by yourself outside of your job with all of your project specifications, then this question will seem very familiar to you. There are lots of cool new things out there to try out and yet you have to limit yourself to certain technologies for the sake of your project. One of the main reasons for my decisions was the maintainability of my blog. I didn't want to constantly add a new .html file and still schedule the date and redirect them to other pages by hand.
What's under the bell?
I'd call myself a little „hype-driven". This characteristic property is not always the best, but it helps me to adopt the "new" things faster. Since I have never worked with static site generators before, this property has already helped me here again. I spent a few hours evaluating the pros and cons of Jekyll, Gatsby, Next, or Hugo. But in the end, my choice handed me to Gatsby. Why? Because I can use JavaScript and especially React while developing and it's comparable cheap and fast if you deploy your project via your git pipeline to Netlify or surge.sh etc. To build a good user interface on top of that, I've decided to use TailwindCSS as my CSS Framework. So Tailwind is a bit different compared to frameworks like Bootstrap or Bulma. It's not a UI Kit itself and has no default themes or built-in UI components right from the start. So you won't find predefined things like navbars in bootstrap instead you use these single utility classes to build those by yourself. The positive thing is that you can only use what you really need for each of your components and you can develop incredible fast.
Hurdles that I managed
So now I told you something about the technologies I've used but it's no secret that I had some small tripping stones on my way to success. It has to be said that many of the challenges I came across with are challenges that I need to face in my learning process. A few lines before I said that I used React for this project. This was a curse and a blessing at the same time for me. Why tho? Because React, with all these dependencies, doesn't necessarily appear to be clear when you start out. It takes some time until you have the courage to deal with all these topics related to React, NPM etc. if you don't get any help from others.
Conclusion
Now, if I gather all this together and finish this short article where I gave you a short insight about which cool stuff I've used, I can say that this project gave me some first cool impressions while using GatsbyJS, Tailwind and React. After all the reward for the time that I pushed into this project was the basic structure of my blog, where I can write neat blog posts now.
If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you. - FRED DEVITO