New Beginnings

Last year, I decided to start my own company. It has been something I have wanted to do for over 10 years. In that time I have been consulting and working as a solution architecture I have worked in with enterprise systems, primarily with Transport Management Systems (TMS) in Australia, and around the world.

Now I find my self in need of a website. I am determined to do it myself, and learn a new set of skills along the way. I have a somewhat technical background. While not working as a developer, I have done some development in my time, and continue to enjoy the challenges that come with solving problems with technology. Last year I went down the Arduino rabbit hole, learning C++ and a little about electronics.

Tech Stack permalink

About 4 weeks ago, i started on my journey of learning , HTML, and CSS really well, and doing a bit of javaScript if required.

I have spent much time doing tutorials on youTube, reading and researching on w3schools, learning Adobe XD, and also Affinity Design. Because of course I don't want to just build a website, I want to design it, and make it beautiful.

As always, I really wanted to keep the site as simple as possible, while providing some core functionality. For now, I am staying away the popular JavaScript frameworks but I am very interested in building my website with a headless Content Management System, following the principals of JAMStack.

JAMStack permalink

JAM stands for:

• JavaScript
• API
• Markup

JAMStack is of interest to me because it promises better performance, higher security, easier scaling and a better developer experience.

But when I looked further into it, I realised there is a whole other world of build tools that are needed for a modern static website. As is stands today, I don't want to delay this site any further. I want to get something out there, so I can start sharing my ideas. But I am very reluctant to do down the WordPress path.

SO where to from here? JAMStack is pretty new, and as I said, many of the tools are quite intimidating for a newbie. Likely I have been listening to Shop Talk to try and get a better feel for the front end developer world. It has been a great resource for me, and I am starting to follow the conversations more each episode I listen too. One of the guests who really impressed me was Andy Bell who was talking about 11(ty). So I did some research, and to be perfectly honest, I really had no idea where to start.

Hylia permalink

Thankfully, Andy has already solved this problem with the hylia Starter Kit. It is super easy to get started with this template, and deploy to Netlify. Netlify are the company who has popularised static websites, by re-branding it as JAMStack.

In addition, this also allows me to slowly learn more about headless CMS, build tools, HTML templates and JavaScript in the future.

That is how I got this site up and running within 24 hours. I have made a few minor updates to the template, but all in all, I have left it vanilla for now. I will now focus my efforts on getting great content out there, while continuing to progress the website design.

Its an exciting, frustrating and hopefully rewarding journey.