First steps

First time I thought about creating personal site was when I was taking java courses at EPAM Systems. The main motivation was to learn new things. So I've created a list of technologies I wanted to build my blog with:

At that moment I haven't worked with either of them (except MySQL I guess) and hardly understood how I could wire them all together. Also you might noticed that I didn't write a word about infrastructure and deployment of my future site (I had no idea about it).

Time went on, I got a job, started to get familiar with technologies from my list: we actively used Liquibase on my first project; I figured out that I can use fancy groovy and gradle instead of xml and maven to write build scripts; but the main frontend library was jQuery, and it was clear that I wouldn't like to use it in personal project. In a year I joined project with AngularJS, one more year later I had realized that I would not use either :-)

Getting closer to right stack

Meanwhile react was getting more and more popular. And I decided to give it a try: colleagues of mine and I started local frontend community - WebPurple and to be true frontend community it must have its own site. Its first version has under the hood: react, redux,material-ui, koa, mongoose and was deployed to some VPS. I've learned a couple of things:

• Material Design fits tools best (not sites)
• managing content manually is bad idea
• IaaS is overkill (also painful) as well as PaaS (after a couple of months fighting with manual setup of all infrastructure to VM I've moved to heroku and mlab) for promo site
• I don't want to pay for hosting (or a at least it to be cheap)
• I want WebPurple site to be BLAZING fast (without much effort)

Love at second sight

Any ideas on what I am gonna talking about? Static site generation, JAMStack, GastbyJS! In early 2018, I began to hear more and more about Gatsby. I don't know why didn't pay much attention to it when I first time heard about it (I might thought it is not applicable for my cases). But after I started to investigate the approach (JAMStack) it offers I had fallen in love 😍. It took me about 2 weeks to migrate the whole (thought it is not that big) site from koa, mongodb and heroku to gatsby, netlify-cms and netlify.

• ⚡️site had perfect performance by default

  • static markup (first load)
  • code splitting
  • image optimization
  • prefetch...

• 💃content is easily managed via CMS

  • user friendly UI
  • extensible (build on react)
  • content stored alongside your code (in git repo!)...

• 🙈infrastructure is the simplest (ADN aka better CDN)

  • CD - deploy on every git push
  • automatic PR preview
  • https, custom domains, AWS lambdas...

You can checkout the result - www.webpurple.net (source). I've even given a talk (russian) about it.

Later I've applied gatsby for one of my customers news site, but with a bit different setup: strapi as a CMS and Jenkins as a CD tool.

Happy end

Finally I felt like I've found best toolchain and it was time to get my hands on personal site. Since I fill pretty comfortable with technical stack (although this time I use contentful as CMS, travis as CI/CD and github pages as a hosting), my motivation is less about learning new things and more about improving my english (via writing articles about amazing things I deal with) and a bit of showing off 🤓. I hope you enjoy the site (its unique design 😇). And you started to think about building your one (using great gatsby of course). Keep in mind that gatsby is suitable not only for blogs or promo-sites, it can make any of your sites performant (even for e-commerce project).

P.S.

By the way I've started to develop my site before it had become mainstream 😂.