July 4, 2024 - Making a Personal Website
I haven't finished a website in almost 2 years. I have never done much of react or even javascript in general in the past. So needless to say, I faced quite a few challenges when I decided to fully remake my website from the ground up.
Chapter One - Motivation
I always told myself that I would remake my website sometime soon. I never really liked my old website designs and I still don't find it quite satisfactory. But during the last 3 years, I would wake up everyday, tell myself "today is the day I remake it," then proceed to do nothing at all. This cycle went on and on and on and on. I'm sure you experienced it too at some point. There is a good chance there is something that you had wanted to do for quite a few years, but never had gotten around to doing it. Welp, I am here to share how I go over that initial hurdle.
So, I recently got into my dream program at my dream university. And over the last month after I got my acceptance letter, I've developed something called an "imposter syndrome." If you aren't a zoomer, it basically means that you don't feel like you belong in crowd you got put into. From that moment on, I knew I had to change something in my life to try and remedy this unsettling feeling. But, it was exam season at the time, so all my thoughts and actions needed to wait until the exams were over.
After I finished my exams, I recalled an old Greek saying "A sound mind in a sound body." If you didn't know, it was by the philosopher Aristotle. In my opinion he was one of the worlds best thinkers ever. So, with this knowledge, I started runnning and going to the gym (again) though it was my first time actually being consistant with running. When I first started going on daily runs, my body would feel like it was destroying itself by the end of each run. I fear without my previous experience at the gym, I would've gave up again due to the pain. But I pushed through. Over the next week, I went from running 1 kilometre before stopping to 5 kilometres before stopping. I personally think that's some good improvement. But that's not the main story.
A picture of the sky while I was running.
From the runs, I began to realize how little pain coding really was compared to the physical strain I was putting on myself. Coding is just sitting down infront of a blue screen expending brain power for spaghetti. When compared to running, which is expending physical power at the cost of muscle pains, aches, shaking, and just more pain in general, it really isn't much. So this got me the motivation to sit down and code today.
Chapter Two - Coding
Now that I am trying to do web development stuff again, I can safely say, I still hate javascript. It is probably due to my current lack of knowledge, but the syntax is so inconsistant, and it is so stringy and awful. I hate it. But, modern sites need mordern solutions, so I forced myself to remake my website using a react framework. If you didn't know, previous I just coded websites using html, css and bootstrap. It got most of the stuff done, but I felt a little limited when I wanted a bit more modulation and function. So this time, I turned to react.
NGL, I thought it was going to be harder than it was going to be. The default react template actually set me up for a clean, basic, and simple portfolio layout. Only problem, was that it was dark mode. But I fixed that issue relatively quickly. The first problem I ran into today was that I decided to use Cloudflare as my registrar and my website host... which turned out to be more complicated that I thought it would be. For obvious reasons in hindsight, Cloudflare forces eslint into every js file it runs on their servers. It's good for security and practice afterall: it is what they're known for. But me, who is relatively inexperienced in coding in javascript in general, didn't know that. So I kid you not, spent 40 minutes trying to debug an issue, which all I had to do was delete an unused variable / import... 40 minutes of my life I will never get back.
The second issue that arose was just that I didn't know how to do anything in react. Mind you, this was really my first actual experience using react to code something usable. So, the new syntax such as 'className', 'style={{}}', and not being able to link html sites within my own projects easily was all a little challenging for me. Mind you, I got around most of them, and this blog site is a work-around of the html issue... Yeah, I'm not the greatest problem solver, but I don't care enough to do a more elegant solution. I just wanted to put out my websites as soon as I could.
My third issue was that Cloudflare doesn't tell me if my latest push to GitHub actually deployed or not. Since I still do not have eslint installed on my computer, my code basically always runs as javascript is quite lenient. So, it turned out that the latest version of my website that I wanted to deploy, went undeployed for a few hours before I noticed that my changes weren't showing up on my domain. So needless to say, I will be installing eslint on my computer to lower inconsistancies with Cloudflare and my own workspace.
Overall, I think this website turned out fine at the moment. I want to add some animations and some design elements, but I need to learn more javascript and niche css in the meantime so I can be able to do that in the future. My prediction was also correct, coding is much more painless than running and physical exercise. But, I sitll want a healthier body as I am unhealthy at the moment.
Hopefully I will update soon and not go on another 3 year hiatus...