Hello Blog World!

Well the first Monday after finishing the bootcamp, and it felt odd to not be sitting down to a morning Zoom lecture with my cohort. It’s like at the end of Finding Nemo where they’re all bobbing about in their plastic bags after the escape back to the ocean and go - Now What?

I do have a better plan of action than Nemo and co happily. After a weekend of no code, I’m ready to get back to coding and the first port of call is getting my portfolio and projects in order! Today I’m planning what needs to be done to finish off my showcase projects, how I’m going to build my portfolio and what my next learning priorities are.

I plan to use this blog half as a record and reflection of my progress, but also as a good motivational prod to keep exploring and expanding my skillset.

Tuesday - And the results are in!

So, after yesterdays research I’ve decided to build my portfolio in 🥁drumroll🥁 React / GatsbyJS!

I would really like to continue practising React, and using GatsbyJS will allow me to look into GraphQL a bit.

At the Christmas break I had started a test portfolio styled with Bootstrap5. I really liked how it was looking, and I am a BIG fan of it taking care of responsive resizing, but seeing as it is still in alpha (V5.0) I’ve decided it is probably not best to continue with it. However there is a react-bootstrap library that I definitely will be making use of.

I appreciate the downside to Bootstrap is the lack of uniqueness to a site, it is generally instantly recognizable, but for getting a simple and clean portfolio up and running I hope it will do the job!

Wednesday - WWW the Wild West Web

Well as always with trying to make sense of a new library there has been a fair bit of bewilderment. That said, Gatsby Docs have definitely been one of the the more comprehensive sets of documentation I’ve come across.

Once you stray outside of the safe confines of the docs however, it’s a wild west of clashing opinions on what’s the right way to implement something. I think before Northcoders this had me completely thrown. I wanted to find the best practise, but ultimately, more often than not that answer is different depending on the project. With technologies updating so fast as well, an article written in 2019 may well have been great to the time, but a more recent version has features the make it outdated. Aside from this - I need to remind myself that is it okay for the first draft or first project to be messy - that’s what refactoring is for :)