My new home on the web. A basic personal website built using React and Firebase.
Built as my first post-bootcamp personal project built as a means of delving deeper into React and honing the skills to build more complex applications in the future.
I thought it would be fun to update this after a few years of working as a developer so that it can serve as a testament to how much I have learned on the job. I also wanted to make it more representative of where my React skills and coding style are at now. With all that in mind, I want to make a couple of dislaimers/notes:
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React + TypeScript are not necessairily the best tools for the job of building a personal site - I know there are easier ways to create a simple static site. I could have gone back to basics here by crafting something using vanilla HTML/CSS/JS and deploying it to GitHub pages. For context though, when I first built this site I was brand new to both React and web development, and was trying to familiarize myself with the most in demand tools of the day. Gatsby wasn't around yet - or at least hadn't yet gained widespread adoption - so in order to gain a better understanding of React I tried my hand at building something from scratch.
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Firebase is unnecessary and doesn't really serve much of a prupose here - again, my excuse for this particular choice is that it was made three years ago when I only had the vaguest sense of what I was doing/the best way to go about doing it. This was a tool I had heard about, which I was curious to learn more about, so I used this site as an opportunity to play around with it.
I fully felt the reprocussions of that choice when I figured out that the firebase dependency was pusing my main JS file over 244 kB even when running webpack in production. However I did some research and learned that this is a known issue that has even been encountered by members of the Firebase team. I had some fun researching/implementing a solution to load the dependency as a separate chunk (so as not to block the initial page render), but ultimately I will probably migrate away from this tool once I have the time to assess options and port my data elsewhere.
Anyway, please keep in mind that this is still very much a work in progress. Going forward I plan to update it more frequently than once every three years 🙃