It wouldn't be a new year without the desire to relaunch my personal website. Happy 2018!
It could be another case of New Years delusion, but this year I think the timing might actually make sense. Over the past year I've been exploring React and the world of Decoupled Drupal. After working through Wes Bos' React For Beginners course and having some concepts finally click, I took another shot at creating a web app based on the Album of the Year Project. Having a project I could slowly chip away at over the year provided a great low pressure way to learn, and also prevented me from having to re-learn things as they vanished from my brain. I'd love to duplicate that situation in 2018.
Next up learning wise I'm planning on continuing my experimentation with the JAMstack by way of Gatsby.js. I like what I've seen of Gatsby thus far. It allows me to leverage all of the things I've enjoyed about React, while combining that with the features of a static site generator like Jekyll or Hexo. And it plays nice with Drupal 8 as well, which is a plus.
So welcome to my new Gatsby site. It will be nice to have an active personal website again, but perhaps even more exciting is the fact that this serves as another low pressure project I can chip away at throughout 2018 to learn more about React and decoupling Drupal. I'll start out with a site very close to nothing - little content, little styling - and slowly add new stuff as time and interest allows.
With any luck this site will look completely different by the time 2019 approaches. And hopefully I will have learned a thing or two along the way. If you're curious, the code is available on GitHub.