Attempt No. 1
Back in 2015, I was looking at portfolio websites from some folks I knew from university and decided that I wanted a "modern" looking one for myself. At the time, I only had limited exposure to web development from my co-op work term at Nav Canada in 2012 (where I used ICEFaces) and a hospital database management system group assignment for my Databases course (which used JSP for its backend and Bootstrap for its frontend). Armed with my lack of familiarity with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I ended up hacking together a hardcoded static portfolio website using Semantic UI (because it looked "modern") and hosting it on GitHub Pages (because it's free).
Attempt No. 2
In 2019, while looking for ways to improve my portfolio website, I came across Jekyll. Using Jekyll, it's possible to generate a static website/blog using Markdown, HTML, and CSS. Refactoring my project posts into Markdown and adding a blog sounded intriguing, so I tried to redo my portfolio website using Jekyll and the Clean Blog Jekyll theme by Start Bootstrap. Problem was, I couldn't quite figure out how to customize the website to add a separate "blog" for projects due to my lack of familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and now Ruby (which Jekyll is written in). Being lazy, my second website ended up persistently "under construction" and I ended up taking it down later on.
Attempt No. 3
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, I suddenly found myself stuck at home with a lot of time on my hands. I ended up spending some of that time learning web development with Node.js.
At some point in 2020, I decided that I wanted to try again at building a portfolio website/blog. Now that I was familiar with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Node.js, I considered building a dynamic website to host my project portfolio/ blog. However, managing a database sounded like a lot of work and I didn't want to pay for hosting, so I quickly dropped that option. As a result, I decided to have a look at some other static site generators. I almost considered using VuePress Blog, but I found it very difficult to customize. Also, I thought the default blog theme for VuePress Blog was meh.
Ultimately, I decided to build my portfolio website/blog using
NuxtJS (which is built on top of
Vue.js) and the
@nuxt/content module. I decided to use the
Buefy and Bulma CSS frameworks for the
frontend, since I felt it was more intuitive than Bootstrap
Vue. I also decided to go for a simpler UI this time
around. As a result, I now have a statically generated portfolio website/blog
hosted on GitHub Pages with a responsive UI which scales to both desktop and
mobile screen sizes 😃.
