My Unbelievably Long Journey to Make my Personal Website

Like my website, I started this post a while ago but wanted to finish it once I published my website, so this will probably end up with a lot of rambling and absolutely no structure.

I began building my website a few years ago. I wrote some code, then deleted everything countless times, I still have a few .psd and .ai of my half-designed website laying around in my computer. I knew I wasn't going to respect any design I made, so I decided I'd just wing it and go with the flow.

This version of my portfolio, took me around 3 months before I pushed the code to prod, I only wrote code for this project when I felt like it, so not that often. Since I mainly used 2 different computers for this project, I decide to put my project on github and while I was at it, I made the code open source.

One of the main reason I never fully finished mt website is because I lacked personal projects to showcase, I only had my IE11 death countdown. I wanted to have a few more projects before releasing my website. And the funny thing is that I'm not even looking for work, I just wanted a website because any web developer should have a website I guess.

I wrote the website in PHP, SASS and TypeScript. When I first started this project I wanted to only use HTML5 Pure CSS3 and vanilla JS, but I wanted my site to be bilingual (French and English), so I thought of using JSON files and deal with the translation in javascript and use web components to build the different sections, but then I realized it might not be the best bet for performance and if javascript is disabled, so I decided to use a mixture of PHP and JSON files to deal with the translation (Posts coming to explain this choice). Before choosing JSON to store the translations, I wanted to use gettext and Poedit like we did in school, but that knowledge is so far away and all the tutorials online were unclear. Therefore, I decided to use a less maintanable method using JSON files and PHP.

I apologize for this rambling post, but I had to talk about my journey to make my personal website, you can check it out here : gabriellaroche.dev and the repo right here. It really feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, it's far from perfect, but I'm happy with the final result and I'm happy I finally finished this project.