Finishing OSD600 was a major milestone in my development as a programmer and as a software maintainer. I genuinely cannot express how happy taking that class has made me and how ready I feel to take on the next big project.
But first...
I want to make something simple. I took a break from coding for about a week after my class ended (and thus my stint at Seneca College in general), and decided to enjoy the holidays with the many hours I was given at my part-time job and my girlfriend, with whom I spent lots of time cooking food with on Christmas Day.
But back to the project. I want it to be simple and brush me back up on coding for the front-end. Though the projects I was working on in OSD600 were fun and great, I loved creating link checker and releasing it as well as working on other Javascript-heavy projects, I do feel like my back-end skills have been worked hard for now and though I will return to that, I want to learn more about webpage design and front-end frameworks like React and Vue (having worked largely with Angular the last year).
However, this first project won't be in either of those - it will be with Jekyll.
Yes, that's right, I building a personal website for myself. The project every software developer ruins into at least once. Allow me to outline what I want to build and what I would like to learn:
I would like to learn how to design appealing-looking web pages
The biggest thing for me is that as a software developer, I don't have a terribly great eye for beauty. That doesn't mean I don't understand the basics of how to make something pleasing to look at, it just means that I don't the skill required to design something that's more complicated than, say, a simple blog or table of information. I also am not that confident in my CSS knowledge and I'd like to fix that.
I would like to learn Jekyll
I was originally going to build my website in vanilla Javascript, but I think now that was foolish and instead I'd like to learn a static site generator that will work for simple webpages because even though I love Javascript, I don't want to work for a simple website.
I would like to learn about GitHub Pages
Frankly, I think being able to host my projects straight from GitHub would be such a great option since all my code is going to be there anyway. I know locking yourself into an ecosystem is kind of a bad idea but I don't see anyone raising alarms about it so I'm not too perturbed.
Let's start
First, I created my GitHub pages repository and connected it to a local git repo, then I started getting into Jekyll. I recommend this blog post if, like me, you've gotten used to using WSL in vscode for your web development work.
Jekyll
Getting started with Jekyll is pretty easy. GitHub Pages even has a section on initializing the Jekyll site with Pages.
Not that I have a templated site on my Pages domain, I'd like to make this blog, my dev.to blog, display on my site.
A great GitHub repo for this is equalcoding.github.io, with this template I managed to build a website in about 30 minutes that would display all my dev.to blogs and my GitHub repos.
Next
The next things I would like to do are change up the look of the site and maybe add repos that I've recently contributed to? Or are in general involved with.
Though I didn't particularly learn a ton about Jekyll, since the site I cloned used a lot of vanilla Javascript and HTML, I think themes are very important and I can't wait to explore them more.
If you;d like to take a look at my site, you can see it here.
Until next time!
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