After I gave my first public tech talk, I finally felt confident enough to expose myself to the international dev community. And as I've just shut down two personal projects that were taking up my free time, I decided that time has come: I would build my personal website.
The first thing I did was look for articles about what a personal website should be like, specifically what content should it include. It was a good first step to the wrong direction.
A good first step to the wrong direction.
I avoided looking for design inspiration and focused on the content instead. After a bit of research I came up with a list.
A personal website must have:
- Easy to find contact info
- Downloadable Curriculum Vitae
- A list of my strongest skills
- My best personal projects
- My personality
I started to prototype it, completely ignoring the list I've just made. With the first proposal finished I realized it had nothing to do with these items.
The fact is: that was somebody else's list. It includes what's important to other people who have already built their websites and written articles about it.
Realizing this I started to think about what my site should be. It must be a professional dev website, describing me and what I do, featuring some personal projects and my dev contact info.
I dropped the Curriculum Vitae: it should be personalized to a specific job position, featuring only relevant information.
The skills list? It just doesn't feel right to choose somethings and leaving others off of the plate. Should I put how much % of PHP I know? Should I separate Typescript from JS and SASS from CSS? Why bother? I decided that giving only the general context that I'm (mostly) a web developer would be the right thing to do.
Having the content in mind, I defined what's important to me on a good website in general. It should be fast, accessible, respecting the user preferences (dark mode, low motion, zoom) and should be simple. It must be totally static to be served by GitHub Pages.
It should have no JS. Ok, this last one is just a whim of mine.
Ancient browser support is not something that I'll be worried about. My public target (people interested in web development) is known for hating those entities.
Now that I knew what my site should be, it was time to start the design.
Spoiler: I'm not a designer.
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