How (and why) I am building my personal website

Nishant Singh

Published 

Why?

Couple of reasons. To begin, it's been close to a decade since I wrote regularly on the internet and I think I miss it. So, I am going to start using this website to maintain a blog. "Why build it? Use something like Medium, Ghost...?" you say. Well, I'm a developer now and with a little bit of effort I can get pretty much the same blogging experience with a huge advantage of owning everything and having the flexibility to have fun with the design/layout. Now, another reason for building this website is for it to serve as a playground for all the cool technologies I come across. I swear there is a new one every week 😅.

Let's hope I stick to the promise of writing regularly here. If I do, I'll write on topics such as online education 📚, web development 🌎, developer experience 👨🏽‍💻 etc. Will try my best to keep them fun and interesting 😃. Also hoping that none of my rants end up here and stay limited to my Twitter.

Writing on the internet give you massive leverage.

How?

This website is built using Next.js which is an extremely popular framework for React.js and also my go-to framework for building any kind of websites. I highly recommend it. Lot of best practices built right into the framework by default.

The blogs are authored in Markdown using MDX. I could have set up a Ghost backend to improve the authoring experience and to have a clear separation of content and UI but I want to avoid servers right now (or paying for hosted version of ghost).

For the UI, I have used Tailwind CSS which really helps me "design at the speed of thought".

The last bit of fun I had was to implement a simple page views counter. For that I am using Hasura as the backend. And that's pretty much it in terms of technologies used. You can find the code for the entire website here.

Will catch you on the next one. Like and subscribe?