Having not touched the design and technology of my website for about 3 years I decided that now was a great time to update and modernise my site. In the intervening time since I last touched it a lot has changed for me professionally and in the technology landscape more widely and I wanted the new site to reflect this. When I built v2 I used Gatsby 4 (and then upgraded the site to Gatsby 5) but Gatsby is now been all but relinquished to the preverbal tech graveyard. It's served me well but I was finding that adapting the tech to where I wanted to take it was becoming more cumbersome as time went on.
Design
The first thing I wanted to evolve was the design. Having spent a large portion of my time working alongside the Head of Design at IDX, I gained a much better understanding of the mechanics of good design. While I am definitely not a designer, I was able to apply these principles and achieve results I'm happy with.
The previous iteration was quite minimal and built on top of a Gatsby theme which gave me limited flexibility to expand on. I wanted the new design to be fresher and more vibrant but also built on top of vanilla React components that could be extended or reworked in future.
The tech
For the tech I opted for a more modern approach. The site is built using Next.js 14 and is all Typescript based. The data is all stored statically with MDX files. I've been thinking about ways that I can improve the site in future and I would like to see ways of adding Puck for true "Drag and Drop" capabilities but for now I trialing Obsidian as my MDX editor.
Blogs
Perhaps the biggest new feature for this site is how I've added my blog posts to the site. Seeing the way that Twitter/X has evolved has highlighted to me the fragility of keeping your data with a third party. Previously, all of my posts were kept on Medium while this is a great platform to help expand your audience I wasn't comfortable that this was my only archive of my history throughout my career.
While I have brought all my blogs over to my site and while be using this as the source of truth in future, I still plan on syndicating and sharing with Medium.
In conclusion
As always this website remains a place for me to share my ideas, thoughts and findings throughout my career. It's also a great way to trial new technology and particularly the ease (or not) of migrating to the latest and greatest tech.