Decided to give this blog a refresh by changing UI and migrating from Jekyll to 11ty
Its been quite a while now since I started this blog. While I have learned lots of things along the way since I starting this blog, I have found time scant to write regularly and update it. The fact that the last article published was more than 2 years ago says it all.
So again this new year I decided to change this and write more regularly. I fired up an editor and opened my blog on localhost and started writing another post in markdown on something I was working on at that moment.
Over time I had started disliking the theme I had chosen for my old blog more and more. The primary reason was the bold and big font-sizes of articles list page that kind of hit you in the eye whenever you opened it. I had felt this before as well but kind of ignore it as I said to myself - If you just keep on changing UI all the time, when will you write good content which was your objective in the first place ?
So that morning when I was writing that article I decided to give the site a little more toned down look and feel and subtle touch. Again as I had done earlier I went around the internet and found out a perfect match in Jeremias Menichelli's website.
It always feels a little guilty that after having decent experience and expertise in front-end development I am straight away cloning someone's work. I should be writing it on my own. One thing that a senior front-end developer should code it by hand should be his website, isn't it?
This can be perceived as a lack of my UI skills, but that is something I am not shy of or something that I hide from. I know my expertise on the frontend lies more on the Javascript side of things and architecting large scale frontend apps or working with AWS. Very early on in my career, I had figured out that creating UI was a very complex and difficult job and it deserved a whole lot of experience to master it. This belief stands true even today at least for me. I have worked across the stack over all these years and still feel that creating UI's is more difficult than working on the backend or scaling your app to handle 10,000 requests per sec. This is, of course, debatable but hey, it's my blog so those are my thoughts out there!
Since the last few years, I have not worked actively on the UI side of things as my role had shifted to creating and maintaining large JS codebases and other things. I have the skills to create UI's but achieving the look and feel to match something likable like that of Jeremias would have taken up my time as I would have to revise my HTML and CSS skills and not to mention brush up the responsive design concepts and best practices. Hence I decided to spend my time more on writing good quality posts and learnings from my work more regularly over coding my website's UI from scratch.
Hence the decision to use Jeremias website as the theme. Of course, I have made minor typography changes but overall look and feel remain the same. I'll be looking to customize more with time but as of now, the focus is on writing more.
So why the shift to 11ty from Jekyll?
I had heard quite a lot about 11ty from some of the community members and as it is purely based on Javascript and doesn't come tied up with a UI framework like react I decided to try it out.
Again no specific problem or issues with Jekyll. The need to change look and feel was a trigger and just as because I am well versed with Javascript(Jekyll is in ruby) I decided to change my tool to something that was written in JS so that I can understand things under the hood when I need to.
That's all for this post. To a good year ahead!
Thanks for reading.