Portfolio Site Development using Next.js and Tailwind CSS
Slowly but surely, I'm getting to grips with designing sites using React. I started the site you're browsing now in August 2023, and after a brief hiatus I'm finally finishing that now (Februrary, 2024).
The site will serve as both an example of web development skills I've learnt - such as the dynamic loading of posts from markdown files and UI elements that scale nicely with as many screen sizes as possible - as well as a place for me to dump any of all progress and thoughts on projects I'm working on at a given moment in time.
I chose Next due to some past experience, when I had a go at running an e-commerce site with Medusa JS. What I noticed when initially playing with it -- and again while developing -- is that Next, in contrast to some other React frameworks I've dabbled with seems to just... work? The other day I needed to update Node and Next to make a certain feature on the site work - and even after a change in a major version number after the update, the site was still working in the development environment and compiling perfectly. I feel like that's quite a good indicator of its reliability overall.
Tailwind CSS is also a fantastic tool -- I've never been particulary confident with juggling hundreds of CSS classes and Tailwind just makes the whole thing trivial. If there's a problem with the scaling of anything on here, I can happily admit that I'm the problem, and not the CSS framework. Not always the case and, again, gives me a lot of confidence in recommending it to anybody needing to design a great looking site without copy and pasting any half-broken HTML off of Stackoverflow. I initially designed the site in Photoshop, and I was easily able to quickly make the mockup a reality here.
At the end of the day the site should (hopefully) speak for itself -- it's fairly basic, yes, but it does everything that I set out for it to do. With any luck it's a base that I can build off of for a few years to come.