New Website New Habit

Redesigning and rebuilding my portfolio website has been on my todo list for as long as I can remember. The final straw and kick-start I needed came three fold.

The first was realising I neglected publishing new blog posts because quite frankly, I was embarrassed with how dated the site looked, so kept my distance. The second was recognising how much friction adding new content to the site incurred. Manually coding HTML for each post was a very strong deterrent. Lastly, I was uneasy about the accessibility of some areas of the site. A topic that has grown very dear to my heart.

But here it is. The first iteration of my new website. Along with the new design, technical uplift, and attention to accessibility comes a new habit: sharing what I know.

Looking back through my earlier posts reminded me of a past belief: to only write about things no-one else has done. But this outlook is like an artist refusing to paint a sunset because others have already. It also explains why I only wrote 1.5 posts for every year I've been coding.

I find great pleasure teaching and mentoring others. At work I've run skill-shares on using screen-readers, unit & integration testing, continuous integration, Xstate, Formik, and open banking payments. I enjoy reviewing pull requests and on-boarding new hires. Outside of work I help my brother-in-law with any front-end questions he has.

However choosing to share what I know isn't entirely selfless either. Offloading a decades worth of knowledge should help me organise and retain my thoughts, and perhaps help others in the process.

So watchout for new blog posts spanning the widening responsibility for front-end developers. Once the habit of writing frequently is established I'll drop the leading "Sporadically" from my blogs description.

And in case you wondered. The total friction incurred to publish this on the new site was none. 🎉