Alexito's World

A world of coding 💻, by Alejandro Martinez

Rebuilding my website with GatsbyJS

This days, between watching WWDC sessions, I'm undergoing the renewal of this my personal website and blog.

For the past 3 years this website has been running in a Digital Ocean droplet, with ngnix and static HTML files. I've been using Jekyll as the static site generator but I have to admint that I haven't taken a look at improvinig at any point.

The main reason was that the system itself relies on a bunch of Make rules an specificly crafted directories that made it possible for me to have my blog and podcast in the same place. Jekyll, at least back then, didn't like to have more than one blog so I had to hack it in a really ugly way.

Since then I've been thinking in replacing the system. I've been looking into other solutions, a new version of Jekyll that supports collections, Hugo or even writing my own blog engine in Swift.

I started that project a while ago, I call it Genesis. But let's be honest. I didn't touch my website for years because I hacked something that I was not willing to touch, and I didn't want to endup adding more work into my busy life by having to maintain my own blog engine. Furthermore, I'm not an expert in the web and this stuff moves too fast for the amount of energy that I wanted to dedicate.

But then I found GatsbyJS. At a first glance it looked really cool but... mmm... yeah... Javascript.

But for some reason I could not stop thinking about it. Probably because the image they have in the website showing the pipeline, the separation of concerns of each layer, made the engineer inside me get super excited.

Gatsby home screenshot

So after reading a lot about it and following the tutorials I made my decision. To rebuild my website with GatsbyJS, modern webtools and an enjoyable development process.

This is something I'm working on at the moment, I hope I have it ready soon. My design skills are not that good, but the best thing is that I'm learning a bunch and there is nothing better than that!

Stay tunned for more articles about GatsbyJS.

Where you're gonna see me write nice things about Javascript.

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