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Discussion on: What tech did you use to build your personal website/portfolio? 2020 Edition!

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Matthew Miller

This year I rebuilt my personal site, justmatt.co. I challenged myself to see how small and fast I could make the final result, and so I decided to use a static site generator. I eventually settled on Metalsmith because it's written in Node and has a large number of plugins that make development easy.

I started with Bootstrap for the layout, but I only included the grid system, which comes out to about ~7kb. I focused on a lightweight design, taking care to only include code and resources that were actually being used on each individual page. I implemented lazy-loading for images and an image-scaling pipeline in my site generator that creates several resolutions of each image in both WebP and jpeg format to minimize downloads to the client.

In the end, a typical article on my site is ~150kb gzipped with a header image and loads in under a second on my laptop. The basic article template with with a small amount of content and no image is ~80kb gzipped. I'm pretty proud of what I ended up with and I think it will serve me for a long time.