Welcome to my new website, I’m so excited to share it with you!

It’s a fully fledged website backed by a content management system and I hope you agree it’s a lot better than my previous site. For the frontend I used Gatsby, a React and GraphQL static site generator and for the CMS I used Strapi. Both are powerful tools with a lot of flexibility which has allowed me to put a lot of love into this site and really make it my own. It’s still a work in progress though, and I hope it will evolve as I grow both as a developer and a person.

It took a long time to reach this point and involved a whole other website that I scrapped at about 90% completion. I had been working on that for over a year but the layout felt like the site wasn’t really sure what it was trying to achieve. It was a site to sell myself as a developer, but also share all sorts of projects including non-developer projects, and possibly also a blog…

So I scrapped it. That’s always a tough decision, but I wasn’t going to release something that felt wrong. I started again in December 2020 and asked myself one question: “Why am I making this?”

I’m not really interested in selling myself, at least not at this point in my career, and if I’m being honest, I don’t expect many people to visit my site, so why? Because I just want to. I don’t think I need an end goal (“journey before destination”, etc. etc.). I just want to build a fun site where I can put things I like, something like a journal.

So with “journal” in mind, I downloaded some design software (Figma), learnt how to use it, and spent Christmas designing a new site. This new focus already felt more “right” and after a week I had some rough designs. A couple of months of development later and here we are! The core CMS is ready to go and the core features of the site have been built, and I’m writing the first blog post.

I have lots of ideas for where to take this site but nothing set in stone as I want to let it evolve naturally. As for what’s next though, some things still need a little polish and no doubt I’ll find some bugs when I test it on different devices and screen sizes (though I’ve done my best to check this during development). When I’m happy with it, first up will be adding the games page! I think that will be a lot of fun. :D

Thanks for checking out my site. I hope you enjoy seeing it evolve and grow!