The BayanBennett.com Stack

The last time I updated my website was probably about 2015. I would hope that in those years following that update, I would have learned a thing or two about web development. Considering I've been a web applications engineer for that time, I thought it would be good to do a solid refresh.

The Previous Model

The Client Side

Built entirely in AngularJS in 2015, replacing my old site developed on Wix. It was a single page application that simply listed some of the things I was working on. There was a lot more that I wanted to do, but life took over and lowered its priority.

The Server Side

Just firebase static site hosting.

The Current Model

The Client Side

The first thing that I really wanted to change is to move from a single page application to a generated static site. The main reason for this was to improve performance and not have to constantly worry about code splitting. Before deciding between the big three: Angular, React, Vue; I first took a look at the most popular static site generators for each: Angular-Universal, GatsbyJS, and NuxtJS. GatsbyJS stuck out to me as the most fully featured and flexible of the three. So, that meant learning React.

I found both React and GatsbyJS straightforward to work with and quick to get up and running.

The Server Side

Originally, I used Google Cloud Build and a Google Cloud Storage bucket, but ultimately, it was far easier (and cheaper) just to use Netlify.

Conclusion

This post is just highlighting some of the tools and methods that I used to build this site. I'd like to make some more detailed posts about the implementation of each of the mentioned technologies. If you're reading this and want to know something specific about GatsbyJS or Netlify, please let me know.