Like my website, I started this post a while ago but wanted to finish it once I published my website, so this will probably end up with a lot of rambling and absolutely no structure.
I began building my website a few years ago. I wrote some code, then deleted everything countless times, I still have a few .psd and .ai of my half-designed website laying around in my computer. I knew I wasn't going to respect any design I made, so I decided I'd just wing it and go with the flow.
This version of my portfolio, took me around 3 months before I pushed the code to prod, I only wrote code for this project when I felt like it, so not that often. Since I mainly used 2 different computers for this project, I decide to put my project on github and while I was at it, I made the code open source.
One of the main reason I never fully finished mt website is because I lacked personal projects to showcase, I only had my IE11 death countdown. I wanted to have a few more projects before releasing my website. And the funny thing is that I'm not even looking for work, I just wanted a website because any web developer should have a website I guess.
I wrote the website in PHP, SASS and TypeScript. When I first started this project I wanted to only use HTML5 Pure CSS3 and vanilla JS, but I wanted my site to be bilingual (French and English), so I thought of using JSON files and deal with the translation in javascript and use web components to build the different sections, but then I realized it might not be the best bet for performance and if javascript is disabled, so I decided to use a mixture of PHP and JSON files to deal with the translation (Posts coming to explain this choice). Before choosing JSON to store the translations, I wanted to use gettext and Poedit like we did in school, but that knowledge is so far away and all the tutorials online were unclear. Therefore, I decided to use a less maintanable method using JSON files and PHP.
I apologize for this rambling post, but I had to talk about my journey to make my personal website, you can check it out here : gabriellaroche.dev and the repo right here. It really feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, it's far from perfect, but I'm happy with the final result and I'm happy I finally finished this project.
Top comments (2)
Nice, me i'm Still struggling on having motivation to finish my website, but your post motivated me and showed me that i'm not the only one feeling like that
I'm glad I motivated you! Have fun coding!