Hello World

Welcome to the first of hopefully many blog posts about all things software engineering and technology. This first post is a brief 'why and how' of building this site.

Why

Or better yet, why not. I have wanted to get my last name as a domain name for a while, but with the .com and .com.au being taken for some time I was out of luck. However recently .au became a new top-level domain (TLD). When that happened I decided I would try to get hines.au which as you can guess, I was successful.

Now that I had a domain I needed to do something with it. A personal space to write about my projects seemed like a good fit. I didn't want to just settle for an off-the-shelf solution like WordPress etc. I wanted to take the time, learn some new skills and technologies and build a site myself, and from that, I started this site.

The How

Source

This website is built using NextJs and Typescript for static site generation. Overtime I expect this to extend to using more of the NextJS SSR features, however as the site exists at the time of writing static generation is all I needed so why over-complicate the hello-world?

The styling is handled by Tailwind CSS and SaSS with Tailwind handling the layout and responsive design SaSS on top because I prefer SaSS for theming support rather than Tailwind's dark: prefix. I mostly picked Tailwind because I wanted to try it out and I find projects like this are a great way to test out new approaches.

Hosting

Hosting at the time of writing is handled by an S3 bucket. Again as I add more server-side features I intend on leveraging more of the AWS services to build out more complex features. Ideally, I will post a few follow-up blogs relating to those features when they are built.

Additional details

No modern website would be complete without SEO optimizations, a CDN and website analytics. For that, I am leveraging CloudFlare. CloudFlare CDN and website metrics offer a great pricing structure to get started. How could I argue with free? I doubt this simple site will breach cloudFlare's free tier anytime soon.

Conclusion

That's it. Hello World and welcome to my site. I hope you'll return to find new and exciting content here soon.