Objective

I needed a place to showcase previous work for potential clients or employers and to serve as a online resume.

FYI, currently looking for a full time front end developer role. If your company is hiring I'd love to hear from you!

Goals identified going into project:

• Design site for mobile first.
• Wanted to keep it clean but not too generic.
• I didn't want to devote too much time to this project so I knew that I'd probably need to bring in a component library or css framework.
• Incorporate more interactivity and transitions knowing that most visitors will be developers using more modern high performance devices so performance is less of a contraint.

Solution

I decided to use Sanity headless CMS for content management, Gatsby.js for server side generation, Material UI for the component library, and continuous deployment was handled through Netlify with webhooks; rebuilds triggered when content changes on Sanity or source code changes on GitHub.

The contact form controller is a serverless function on Netlify which is deployed as an AWS Serverless Lambda. This allowed me to add the little bit of back end functionality I needed without deploying a backend for just one endpoint.

Using a stack that I've used multiple times in the past and adding in a component library saved a lot of time, gave a clean starting point for UI design but still allowed a lot of customization.