Personal site

The page you are reading right now (2021 - Present)

For some time, I was toying with the idea of having my own, personal corner on the Internet. Sure, GitHub and LinkedIn exist for self-presentation, but I wanted something more. A place, where I could articulate my thoughts, showcase my Projects and generally express myself without constraints imposed by the aforementioned social networks. And then I finally sit down and began working on it.

The first task was to determine a tech stack. As I already knew some React, I decided to go with it. Then I wondered if I should take time to learn a framework for more effective creating of static websites, such as Gatsby. I decided it's not worth the effort, as my functional requirements were very simple, but I might come back to it in the future and attempt a rewrite. Then the most challenging part began - creating the content.

I am fairly used to watching English movies, reading English books, and even using English in informal discussions. But it was unusual for me, to formulate longer, coherent paragraphs in English, where I need to focus on proper grammar, sentence structure, and word choices. Thankfully, tools like Grammarly exist to help in these cases. The result is not perfect (maybe because I was not willing to pay 30$ for their Premium plan), but I hope it is readable. If you spot a typo or really poor wording, please let me know.

Another difficulty was collecting information about projects I have done throughout my life. Some of them I haven't thought about in many years and I sure as hell didn't have screenshots of them in action. So I started to scan through old repositories, hard drives, and e-mails to put the pieces together. For example, in order to recreate the illustration images, I had to set up a new Minecraft server, re-connect my IRC bot, dig through my high school student groups on Facebook, or fix a broken JavaFx application. As a reward, I got the nostalgic feelings from bringing long-forgotten projects that were once very close to my heart back to life.

Then came the fun part - adding various whistles and bells, like the pronunciation of my name, or automatic fetching of my last GitHub commit information. I hope I didn't overdo it (even if I did, I still like it too much to remove it, #sorrynotsorry).

When I was finally done, all that was left was to share the result with the world. I was glad I finally had an opportunity to try out Netlify for hosting static web pages (and I am very satisfied with their user experience) and I convinced myself yet again, that Porkbun is a solid domain provider. And just like that, we were live!

Lessons learned: How to showcase a portfolio and design a modern, responsive webpage. Also, CSS is more difficult than I remembered.