Building My Portfolio Website

It's been a while for me since I dove into something purely web-based, but as a developer I feel like you always talk about creating your own portfolio for showcasing your skills and what you can build.

I finally put it into action.

I thought this would be a worthy project to take on, in my current jobsearch and take a look at some of the newest tech like Next.JS, Tailwind CSS, React (in more depth), GSAP and Three.JS (A JavaScript framework for amazing 3D animations) and Prismic (a headless Content Management System).

Prismic and its developers have created excellent documentation on how to get started with all of their tools, and I was interested in more of a developer-friendly way for something like content creation and management. Using Prismic seemed like a good way to get started on a website portfolio and blog, and I am glad that having built this, I can publish a new post without having to go back and touch code having done the heavy lifting in the beginning of this project. The beginning took about ~5 hours, and add in another 4 for my touch-ups and personal details that I like.

The blog is set up to automatically list out and display a new blogpost or project page that I create - even now when I am not required to touch any of my code. I can make a new post or project page in Prismic, and have it be reflected in my live site within a matter of minutes.

Having built it this way, I can say I will have the confidence to further build on Prismic, or even branch out and create more of my vision in Next.JS or React in the future if I want to make something more custom (to be honest, I'll probably do that when I want to make a Photography page, maybe even host it on the Cloud in AWS...).

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There's a lot of great libraries and frameworks to choose from; it's great to get exposed to them to know what others are building with today. This website was also hosted on Vercel, which points to the domain that I bought, matthewryan.dev, which is the site you are on. (~Vercel is also excellent for easily hosting your content in the Cloud).