About

So COVID-19 is a thing that's happening at the moment. Stuck inside the house and "in between jobs", there's no better time to finally build my own website.
I've only been freelancing for like 3 years or so without one.

It's not that I haven't tried to put my own website live before. I build websites for a living but when it comes to building one for myself, I can never seem to settle on a solution. I predominately work with Umbraco but have also built websites using Sitecore and Wordpress. I always want to use something shiny and new for my own website. Web development moves so fast and I feel like I have to stay relevant. I convince myself that building my own site is a great way to learn a new skill. It usually is but ultimately once I have a handle on whatever the new thing is, I kinda lose interest. Consequently, no website for me. As I write this I realise there's about ~30% chance these words will ever be read online. haha. Go me!

So Wordpress. I really like what Wordpress can do. Plugins for all the things, advanced custom fields for everything else. The only thing that I struggled with at first was the development workflow. That is until I found Sage. It really did help a lot. I had my DigitalOcean docker all setup and the development process had structure now and Blade templates were a joy and yeah, it was just boss. So obviously, I started building my personal site using this method but then I got a new contract and my free time kinda disappeared. The new contract was with an Umbraco gold partner.

So Umbraco. I've been working with Umbraco since, well, since it began. I am old. Working with an Umbraco gold partner though, man, those guys could turn Umbraco up to 11. I build mainly small/medium sized solutions and as a lone wolf (or a wolf pack of one) you can get set in your "ways". Working with Umbraco celebrities made me re-evaluate some of my dogma. Anyhow, where was I... yes, I want to build my own website using Umbraco. Yay! That wasn't so difficult now was it.

So now I know what technology I want to use, I can just go ahead and build a normal Umbraco site now yes? Nooooo. Too easy I hear myself say. Where's the learning going to happen. I'll tell me where. Let's drop some buzz words yo. How about we bust out Headless? Let's mix some static site generation in there. Throw in some Vuejs and top it all off with tailwindcss. Oo, Oo, let's do it on a budget too. Can I run a blog for the price of a domain name?

How do I bring all these things together?

Gridsome, it's my new favourite thing.