Building this website

Last Modified: Unknown Creation Date

Purpose

My goal with this website is to incrementally make the task of sharing my coding experiences more pleasant.

Personal Background

I’ve been creating coding projects since December 2022. Most projects stem from building something that aims to solve a niche problem
One thing that can sometiemes be annoying when building new projects is having to re-create code and configuration steps

Requirements

Free
Faster development cycle than building with plain HTML, CSS, JS

Something Unique

The data from the form linked in the footer sends the response to an email address
Uses a responsive layout through CSS Grid rather than bulky media queries.

Tech Stack

11ty
Firebase
Sass

Why 11ty?

Compatible with multiple templating languages
No vendor lock in
The drawbacks of lack of features ( CMS integration, plugins, templates, API integrations, complex data processing, built-in asset optimization ) weren’t glaring because of the lack of my need for them

Why Sass?

Hierarchical CSS = less of a need for me to keep track of longer css selector

Why Firebase?

If using GH pages, I’ll need to implement a backend anyways.. Firebase offers hosting and serverless functions
Wanted to not focus on learning backend implementation so that I could continue to refine my front end skills && technical writing. Reason for this is its far more easy &| enjoyable to abstract the back end compared to the front.

General Concepts Learned

Using package.json scripts to simplify commands needed to process / watch sass, run 11ty locally. I still manually deploy to firebase
Using .gitignore && .env

Tech Stack Specific Concepts

Utilizing the 11ty config file to retrieve the script from the source and transmit it to the client side,
Using Nunjucks ( .njk ) to create templates of HTML.
Using Markdown ( .md ) to glue together Nunjucks templates with their respective content
Using _data directory to provide the entire website with global values such as consistent url routes, tab icon