Towards Minimalism
I have rebuilt my personal site, again.
Iteration #1 was a static Bootstrap v4 site that served me well for 3 years. It had a gimmicky 3D head rendered with Three.js that followed the cursor. Somehow, this site helped me land my first job out of university.
Iteration #2 was a redesign using Svelte v3 — because a fully-fledged JS framework is obviously needed for a small personal site. The gimmick this time was a grid of interactable hexagons, one for each project, which took me far too long to make responsive. Funnily enough, this site also lasted 3 years and helped me land my second job.
Iteration #3 is the current one. At least, that's true at the time of writing. For this iteration, simplicity was the goal — no more gimmicks that I'd get sick of in a few years. Plus, I hate the bit rot that JS projects seem to be particularly prone to. I no longer want to hold my breath when running npm run dev, praying that nothing broke while I was away.
My plan was to use Jekyll & GitHub Pages, but then I stumbled across Bear. It offered 80% of the features I was looking for, saving me the effort of implementing them myself. As I get older, I find myself increasingly leaning towards "buy" over "build" to preserve time for more interesting endeavours. Another neat thing about Bear is that there is no vendor lock-in — everything is in Markdown/HTML. Even though the platform is built to last forever, my content can easily be ported elsewhere if needed.
All in all, I'm happy with the new setup and it took less than a day to get up and running. Nevertheless, see you in 3 years for iteration #4.