Hello world. We meet again.

31st of July, 2023•2 minute read

I recently read "Show your work!" by Austin Kleon, which inspired me to finally get my website up. This is my third attempt, with the first one using Angular and Strapi, the second using Sveltekit with MD rendering, and now I'm using Next.js with MD rendering.

The Motivation Behind My Website

After being made redundant, I'd been interviewing a lot and noticed recurring themes in the questions across most companies. While I have experience and knowledge in those topics, I often couldn't articulate my ideas effectively during interviews. So, I wanted to start writing down my ideas to solidify them and improve my writing skills. Also, building this website gave me an opportunity to brush up on my development skills and share my knowledge to help others.

Choosing the Right Stack

As for the choice of the stack, my recent experience managing a team working with Next.js convinced me of its power and good developer experience. I had to do some research on the supplimentary tooling, and found the most time-consuming part was choosing the UI library. I experimented with MUI, DaisyUI, NextUI v1 and v2, and a couple more. Ultimately, I settled on DaisyUI based on Tailwind, which has proven to be the best choice for its ease of use and customization capabilities, while avoiding the need for use client for every page.

For markdown rendering, I'm using ContentLayer, and I perform local SMTP mail testing with Mailhog running in a docker container. The database, which currently doesn't serve any specific purpose, is in Pocketbase. I'm considering switching to Supabase, but I'll focus on that later..

What's next?

As for what's next, I have around 10 drafts I'm working on, and I plan to continue pumping them out while tweaking the site. I'm also considering writing shorter form posts. Let's see how it goes!