Evolution of my previous Websites

Another year, another website!

Website creation is a very easy way for me to learn new technologies (primarily the latest JavaScript frameworks) and maintain up to spec with the latest JavaScript idiomatic code standards. That being said, I’ve made a lot of progress from my previous websites in comparison to this shiny new one I have created.

One of the first websites I ever created was actually my LMS project. With frameworks purely unknown to me at the time, I created this website with the power of PHP, SQL, and the lovely trio of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. As such, it suffered severe issues with load times, compatibility, and scalability. As we can see, this website already shows limited compatability: while resizable, this was clearly made for 1080p monitors.

Graduating from the simplistic tech stack design used previously, I began to set my sites on various JavaScript frameworks. With significant choice, I made plenty of demo sites on popular frameworks such as ReactJS, NextJS, Svelte, and Gatsby. For my needs, Gatsby seemed the most suitable (and it wasn’t dead at the time of creation) so I created quite a few Gatsby sites as I worked with understanding the prowess of frameworks.

Unfortunately since Gatsby is very dead, I can’t compile and share all of my projects with the vast errors that come with deprecated dependencies. This was what my final Gatsby website looked like, however - a very minimalist text-based design.

Evidently, this website was destined to be scrapped. Even at the time of Gatsby v2, there were numerous issues plaguing development and delivery of the site: hotloading in development was a total mess, and utilizing react components was an absolute gamble at best if they would work properly (I don’t think I ever got react-pdf working). Additionally, trying to move to Gatsby v3 totally destroyed the site. Fun stuff!

In the interim of making my Gatsby website, I did some work for the Momentum Mod website in Angular. Most of my changes were cosmetic though, as I began playing with parallax effects and optimized animations. We finally see some modern web development design! Although Angular had it’s own fair share of problems (and the WebM still doesn’t always seem to loop properly), this was a fun and rewarding experience to be part of. A lot of what I learned help me design this current site in Astro - a culmination of my current skills in web design.