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Sibusiso Dlamini
Sibusiso Dlamini

Posted on • Edited on

My take away from making a photography portfolio site

Photography website status: Deployed ๐Ÿš€

First and foremost, I want to talk about coding as a whole. As much as building this site has been fun it has been extremely taxing. Its reached the point where I have reconsidered programming as a career and I'm not over-exaggerating. I don't know exactly what a software developer title entails but I'm going to assume that spending hours on end in front of a screen will be a part of the job. Something I no longer look forward to. Maybe I feel this way because I ran into a lot of obstacles along the way and my computer is slow and so I get easily frustrated or maybe I didn't take enough breaks between coding sessions which lead to a couple headaches. Bottom line is: the experience was not as enjoyable as I anticipated.

However, if you had to ask me whether I would do it all over again, I would say yes. I've learned so much from this one project and not only that but I have created something that someone can actually put to use. I am on day 17 of 100daysofCodes and I can already mark off one of my objectives as complete. I feel as though I am more of a โœŒ๏ธ complete โœŒ๏ธ programmer because I learned more about the programming languages that I used in building the projects.

The Tech Stack

React

I used React to make this site. Now, looking at it, I would say that it was not entirely necessary to use it in this project. There are features that I intend on implementing in future that will make use of Reacts capabilities so I thought it best to leave it as is instead of reverting back to HTML CSS and vanilla JS.

CSS

Having gone through numerous tutorials in the past I tackled this project with the mindset that most of the styling will be a breeze and boy was I in for a rude awakening. I think I had to watch a video about CSS grid 3 times over for it to completely sink in and until now I still haven't completely grasped it but hey, the site looks decent.

Thanks to this project I now have a better understanding of

โœ… CSS grid
โœ… animation
โœ… font-faces
โœ… importing CSS in React

Conclusion

This project was a pain to complete but it was definitely worth it. To all beginners who are sitting on the fence about whether they should try create a photography site or not, I encourage you to do have a go at it, not only to further their skills but to actually help out a photographer whose work could do with more exposure.

As always, thanks for the read, stay safe, and Happy Coding ๐Ÿ’ป

P.S. I almost forgot. Here is the website if you want to check it out.

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