First post

Hi hi! I am very excited to finally have my portfolio live for everyone to see. I created an earlier version at the beginning of the year, but the design was a bit outdated and just...not great.

I created a first version of the new version. Initially I used GraphQL / Strapi / Apollo. I spent like a thousand hours fixing bugs and reading docs. It was frustrating at times, specially because I kept getting weird errors I wasn't familiar with.

While it worked out great in the end, there were a few issues that made me rethink the whole project:

• I tried deploying my backend (well, the strapi project) to Netlify for hours, with no luck, and ended up using Railway. It's very cool, and they give everyone (I think) $5 off when you sign up. But I didn't exactly love deploying my app to multiple services.
• Also for some reason whenever I created a new post my Netlify app wasn't updating? So I had to do multiple deployments every time. This gets old very fast.
• Strapi caught my attention because it looked cool and seemed like a great tool to manage content. But then, I ended up realizing Strapi was maybe too much for me. I'm not a writer nor a blogger by any means, and I want to write here ocasionally. Markdown files are perfect for me, as basic as they can be. Also it's less overwhelming if I manage only one thing instead of 2 different services, with a bunch of different files, credentials and settings.

Anyway, so, yesterday after like 3 days of working on my portfolio I felt like it made no sense reinventing the wheel. So I cloned a template from Vercel, migrated styles / components / pages to the app directory / and some of the logic into this new project, turned all the TS files into JS files, removed unused stuff, implemented one or two new things, customized whatever needed to be customized and TA-DA.

Sounds like a lot of work, and the old Strapi version was quite a challenge, but using the template made everything very smooth. I still have both my repos in github (frontend/backend), and might even write a post about how to create a blog using React, GraphQL / Strapi / Apollo / Railway in the future, so stay tuned.

Now going back to celebrating this milestone, I have to say I'm super happy with the whole UI, it's just what I imagined! and to know I coded all of it and to know I coded all of it TWICE😮‍💨 lol. Such a nice feeling of accomplishment.

By the way, to create my beautiful baby I'm using the new version of NextJS, which now uses the app directory. Won't go into details as I'd like to address all of these changes and advantages in a future post, but honestly Next is such a wonderful little thing.

Something very important I learned from this whole thing of creating your portfolio twice and then deploying to like 3 different services is: you need to read the docs. Just read them. If you've been trying to solve something for 30 min and there's no progress just look at the docs.

There are still some features I'd like to add, such as tags, but this is good enough for now. If you have any questions feel free to reach out🫡.

See you, F