Finish that side project — Building my portfolio site series

abdulhamidoumer

Abdulhamid Oumer

Posted on January 24, 2021

Finish that side project — Building my portfolio site series

Disclaimer: This is my first blog post on DEV.to so bare with me.

As a developer we all know that it's important to have a portfolio site up and running for yourself. I don't think anyone disagrees when I say that. So I decided to build myself one using Gatsby and Markdown. But in my opinion, having the idea for a project is just 0.1% of the job and we can give actually starting the project a percentage of about 10. Having good discipline and consistency also plays a huge role in completing the said project. All in all, I think we've all seen enough memes about starting new projects without actually finishing the one on hand.

Finishing A Project Meme

In my experience, there were some clear reasons why I was procrastinating like crazy and starting other side projects. To list some of them down below:

  • Thinking that I have to build the site in a fancy tech stack
  • Thinking that I need to participate in many huge projects beforehand
  • The idea that I need to finish all the parts before putting the site on production.

After figuring out these problems the next obvious step would be to find a solution. Let's go through what I thought would solve some of them.

First, to solve the issue with procrastination I decided to blog my experience in a series format. This means I will share with you some of the issues I face and also how I was able to solve them every Monday. Let's hope this keeps me disciplined.

In regards to choosing the best stack, why not use the most simple and performant stack HTML5, CSS & Vanilla JavaScript. This way I will be able to grow my basic skills in using plain JavaScript and make the site highly performant. When the need comes for a personal blog I can easily migrate to Gatsby or any other technology. You can read more about vanilla javascript performance when compared to frameworks on this blog post by Louis Petrik.

I don't think I also need to finish the whole site before publishing it, I can have a landing page with a small description about me and my social media links. Then push features as they are finished. Besides, having the site running as early as possible will help with domain age for SEO.

Finally like what Mark Zuckerberg allegedly said based on the movie The Social Network, "Let the hacking begin"

💖 💪 🙅 🚩
abdulhamidoumer
Abdulhamid Oumer

Posted on January 24, 2021

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