Learn something new

Something I've always tried to do, and believe to be very important in my line of work is to try as best as possible to keep up to date with new technologies, languages and other industry related things that are trending. What a daunting task this can be at times, although it's made easier by my love of coding. It's more than a job to me, it's one of my passions.

Something I had wanted to play with for a little while is the new Netlify CMS, GraphQL and Gridsome.

That's exactly what I decided to build my website using.

So what am I using?

Gridsome

This is a new framework, that generates static pages that are SEO friendly. You can get content from a local database or external APIs, making it really powerful to use. Once it has the content through a GraphQL data layer, you can output it in your Vue.js components.

GraphQL

GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data.

Netlify CMS

Netlify CMS takes a new approach to helping you to managed content. The content is stored as markdown files in GIT alongside your frontend code meaning you get versioning for free, and there is no need for a conventional "backend".

I have used Netlify many times before for deploying and hosting sites static sites and I can't fault it's usability. Everything from adding a new environment with an existing repo, the really simple to use continuous integration etc. Basically I love it. When it was announced that Netlify were releasing a CMS I was over the moon. I have to say it's a little rough around the edges and could do with some improvements, particularly with the documentation, but it's still very new so to be expected. When I have a bit more time I would like to write a more comprehensive post on the negatives and positives of using Netlify CMS.

Anyways... back to my portfolio. So to sum up I am using:

Frontend: Vue.js, Gridsome

CMS: GraphQL, Netlify CMS

Hosting: Netlify

Clean, minimal design

So with the design I wanted to do something simple but nice, whether I achieved that is likely to be a matter of opinion, it could certainly do with some improvements but with the limited time I had to build it out I'm happy with the outcome. I searched through different portfolio designs and got inspiration from each.

Easy for users to digest content

I wanted to display the content in a way that users can just get to the content they want to look at easy enough. Hopefully I have done that, if not do let me know.

Add a blog

Well... here it is!

Update my portfolio

I have added more things that I have worked on more recently.

Other interests

Haven't got around to that yet, but that will come in the future!

It's been a great little project, I have enjoyed building it out, learning something new and updating my little portfolio. It's by no means perfect but it was a good learning project.

Thank you for reading 😊

Blog posts

This little portfolio

A brief guide on how I built out this portfolio.