Website 2.0 and Acknowlegements

4 mins

Nov 17, 2019

Release Day!

It has taken a while to get this done, but damn it feels good. I put a pretty good amount of effort into this one so I could really grow my design skills and intuition. It was a great excuse to finally dive deep into Gatsby to see how I could use it for Paddock Tech in the future. Verdict — it’s amazing. Prerendering is really the way to go with React.

I’ve written more about this revision over on its project page for those interested. The short and sweet is

It’s entirely written in Typescript
I’m using the Material UI component library for React
Any state management I need to do outside of Gatsby and GraphQL is Mobx and React.useState()
GraphQL types are generated using GraphQL Code Generator
The content for the blog is written in Markdown
I built my style guide using Figma and a bunch of guidance from Refactoring UI
Fonts featured are Exo and Inter. Depending on your OS you’ll see Menlo, Monaco, Consolas, or Roboto Mono for monospaced elements. Icon sets include Font Awesome, and Material Icons.
I discovered the most adorable way to combine my initials (JR) 🐶

Acknowledgements

While I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished, it wouldn’t have been possible without a bunch of incredibly talented people who have put the time and energy into their own personal websites and open sourced them. I’ve done the same hoping that my efforts can help someone like me in the future.

A special thanks goes to Steve Schoger and Adam Wathan who’s Refactoring UI book provided invaluable advice for a developer like me to level up my design and UI game. It was worth every dollar it and will help me keep getting better for years to come (perhaps very soon on Trackside).

Without any further adieu, thank you