Motivation

I created this portfolio after realizing that resumes were boring and didn’t tell my employers what I wanted to say. Of course I still have a resume but I felt something creative might give me an edge.

Technologies

The heart of this website is Gatsby, a static site generator and framework on top of React. It allows a developer to create super fast static websites and still have all the power and modularity of React.

To allow to easier error checking (and because I wanted to learn) I chose to use Typescript throughout this project rather than Javascript. Typescript allows for static typechecking to find errors before they become a problem.

I also used Material UI to achieve a consistent look throughout the site. Having not used React in any form before, having some prebuilt components made the development process much smoother, and resulted in a cleaner overall look.

Because it’s a static site, it can be hosted on Github Pages and is! The source code is available here.

Learning

Almost everything in this project was new to me. I had never touched a frontend Javascript framwork before embarking on this adventure, I had never even written client-side javascript. My only Javascript experience was writing AWS Lambdas in Node. Gatsby centers around GraphQL for data retrieval, which is a technology I had some experience in and really enjoy.

Building Enterprise Lambdas in NodeJS →