The Great Gatsby; or, Rewriting my Blog

It’s time.

Just as creating a blog is a developer rite of passage, so too is the rewriting of your blog.

Technology marches on. What was once shiny and precious becomes tarnished from familiarity and lack of attention, the resume pages fray and yellow with age, and the siren-call of the Cool Tech becomes impossible to resist.

outkast

I’ve thrown down the gauntlet by making this post, so feel free to call me out if, in an indeterminate amount of time (typical developer, I hear you say, never wanting to provide estimates), this blog is not look shiny and new.

I refuse to promise it will look better.

The Why

I want to learn React

React

I’m from a C/C++ background, where I moved into C#, and then did a number of years in Angular. Angular was comfortable to me as a .NET dev, as many of the patterns were familiar, and with Typescript, if I squinted, it was basically C#. React is popular as heck, I’ve done some React professionally and for personal learning, and it’s cool, and all my weird front-end friends love it, so why not?

I want to see what static site frameworks look like in 2022

JAMstack

I like Jekyll. It did its job very well, and I was able to get up and running quickly. It still does its job. But, years have passed, and I have an itch to try something new.

I want to learn CSS

CSS

Confession: I’m not great wtih CSS. When I’m in the JS world, I typically stick myself in everything other than CSS, and I’m comfortable. I’d like to get to the point where I can bang through layouts and styling issues without problem. I struggled through solving CSS problems at previous jobs, and it was fine, but since there were dedicated front-enders instead of fullstack who have lacking CSS skills, mostly they’d get the tough problems.

Nothing wrong with that, but I’d like to get a bit deeper this time and do it all from scratch.

The Goals

Okay, so there will be some overlap with the above, and yeah, I know what James Clear says about goals and all that.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Consider these my intentions, and a test of my systems.

  1. Learn React My goal is to have an even better working knowledge of React, modern patterns, techniques and tools.
  2. Learn CSS My goal is to have a good working knowledge of CSS, modern patterns, techniques, and tools, and be able to style and solve CSS issues.
  3. A Working Blog My goal is to have a working blog at the end of this process, with a way to deploy code updates and content easily and reliably.

Wrap up

That’s it for now.

There will be more in this series before I get into the what I’m doing now, problems I’m solving, and how phase.

I think Part 2 will be a bit shorter, focused on technology choices and rough architecture/design targets and intentions.