Hello World!

I have been thinking for a long time about setting up a blog to practice both my dev and writing skills, until the dark days of COVID-19 and accompanying boredom compelled me even further.

Then I stopped thinking and ended up here.

Needless to say, having a web spot to your name brings a few benefits. For example, you can:

• showcase your skills to prospective clients/employers.
• keep track of what inspires you.
• voice your point of view to the world and inspire others.

Considering these and other benefits, I decided to deepen my knowledge of ReactJS and try my hand at the Gatsby framework. This blog project is the result of this effort. Let's discuss the stack employed in its making.

TypeScript

The major language used to develop this website is TypeScript. To me it's an obvious choice. It adds type safety to JavaScript, the language of the web, and I have been heavily exposed to it at work lately.

React.js

Eye candy of the moment, React is here to stay. The declarative, component-based coding style facilitated by the Facebook's library has definitely got me intoxicated.

Gatsby

Gatsby is a framework over React which generates static websites (SSG) optimized for speed and security. It brings, out of the box, Webpack configuration and GraphQL, and can be integrated with many libraries, e.g. Styled Components, by means of plugins. Managing SEO and PWA features with Gatsby plugins is pretty straightforward.

Netlify

Netlify is a very slick web system to host static websites, and – the best part – for free! In fact, their free plan allows for up to 300 minutes of build time per month, which is more than enough for this blog's needs. You can hook it up with your GitHub account for both authentication and CI/CD purposes. Just link the site to your Github repo, adjust your environment variables, and you're all set!

The free plan also allows you to get a customized domain elsewhere (I got mine from GoDaddy) and configure it to work with Netlify, which will provide you with a free SSL certificate!

Netlify CMS

Netlify's content manager is just as good as their hosting service. With little configuration you can bring an enjoyable editorial experience to the table – again, for free. There's a complete workflow where your new post can be saved as a draft before review and publication.

The intermediate stage is translated into a pull request that triggers a bot which, in turn, generates preview pages accessible from your repo!

Conclusion

This stack provides great dev experience. I really enjoyed the process of building my blog and I'm very happy with the final result as a novice blogger. Of course, I'm still working on some improvements here and there, but the Hello World is finished!

Thank you for reading me!