Living through the last couple of years of pandemic-fueled chaos had left me feeling burnt out. Over the last few weeks, though, I've felt more myself than I have in quite some time. Part of this may come from the fact that I've been busy on several new and exciting projects (and part of it probably comes from a slow recovery to my second round of battling COVID). I'm still accepting new projects for the spring/summer of 2022, so if you need a full-stack developer, drop me a line!

This recent wave of creative energy has driven me to do that thing that web developers do: rebuild a perfectly good portfolio website just because. So, for the fourth or maybe fifth time since I've been working in web development, I present to you: my website's new look!

This refresh didn't bring a huge departure from the design language of my last site, but behind the scenes, big things happened: I migrated this site from Jekyll (RIP, Jekyll! You were great!) to 11ty. There were a few reasons for this, but the main ones were that:

  1. I've become increasingly entrenched in the JavaScript world over the last few years. None of my production projects were built with Ruby, so I was becoming less interested in maintaining a Ruby project.
  2. Despite a tight integration with GitHub Pages, Jekyll development was essentially frozen several years ago. 11ty became the platform of choice for many people who were looking for a new static site generator.

The migration process took a bit of figuring out, but 11ty is remarkably easy to learn and to use. If you're into Jamstack development and need a fast, fun static site, try 11ty! I also moved domain registrars and web hosts during this process (my old web hosting company was acquired and became very, very bad). The site is now deployed with Netlify, which is a real delight to use. Netlify is possibly the most developer-friendly solution I've used in quite a while, and it's a good tool for beginners, too.

There are still a few kinks and bugs, but I'm happy with where the site is now, and I'm hoping that the new tech stack will make it easier to push more frequent updates and do more blogging. Plus, there's now an Easter egg hidden in my site. To find it, head to the home page and click on the logo in the main navigation bar. Happy hunting!