How I Made This Website

TLDR: NextJS, AWS DNS, and Vercel

I chose NextJS because I wanted something responsive and minimalistic. I have AWS DNS because it was a hold-over from my last website. I used to use AWS S3 bucket static hosting, but now I use Vercel, which also takes care of my continuous deployment. Vercel saves me so much time, and it's free.

Tutorials I used:

• NextJS Quick Start
• Vercel Quick Start
• AWS Route 53 Quick Start

You can find the source code for my current website on this github repo.

Feel free to use parts of it lol. Just "change it up a bit", so it doesn't look like you copied my homework.

2016 Website

Before this iteration of the website I used to use an HTML5-up template, and AWS for my DNS and hosting.

The HTML5-up template was nice, but it was too inflexible. Conforming content to a "theme" got in the way of the information.

AWS S3 bucket was sufficient for hosting, but updating was always a very manual process of literally drag and drop uploading. Being able to push with ease on Vercel is a life-saver. Anything that decreases cycle-times is invaluable to engineers.

2022 Mardown Blog Upgrade

As I headed into the Summer of 2022, I found myself writing much more frequently, atleast once a week. Typically my workflow for writing was to first draft the actual content in Google Docs.

But there were still additional hoops to put the writing on my website:

1. Use online converters to turn it into html tags
2. Paste into VSCode and edit the crap out of it
3. Insert images
4. Publish and push to Github/Vercel

The second step of the above four would usually take an hour, which is atrocious! Time spent "pushing papes"/"moving code around" should be several orders of magnitude below the time spent writing.

The worst part is if I made any large changes to the Google Docs source (such as to do edits/revisions), I would have to go through the above plumbing steps all over again. This overhead actively discouraged edits and improvements, which sucked.

Thus, I upgraded my website to use the code presented in the NextJS MD to HTML blog example.

Now my workflow is much better:

1. Use the GoogleDocs to Markdown extension to generate .md
2. Paste into VSCode directly with no edits
3. Insert images
4. Publish and push to Github/Vercel

The above steps take 5 minutes tops. This is soooo much better.

It took me about 2 hours to figure out how to add the automatic MD to HTML generation to my website, so as soon as I write two more pieces, I'll be net positive! And as soon as I write two more after that, I'll have justified my investment!