chandrusuresh💻

about

posts

cv

Back to posts

GitHub

URL

frontend
typescript
nextjs
mdx

2024-10-01

New Portfolio Site!

V1 & V2

This is the 3rd portfolio site I have built in the last 6 years. The biggest advesery in developing and maintaining a portfolio site is the reliablity of the site hosting service.

In 2018, my first site was hosted on 000Webhost who unceremoniously archived my site and I lost all my content - I did not save it on Github. It was made using HTML, CSS and a little bit of JQuery and was only used to store WebGL games

The second site was hosted on Heroku, and was made in Django. Whilst Django itself uses SQLite for a simple local databse, when deploying on heroku, it switches to a Postgres database. This service was originally free, but removed in November 2022 for free-tier customers.

V3 i.e This one

This site is built with NextJS, and hosted on Vercel (the creators of NextJS). Whilst I can't speak to the reliability of Vercel for long-term hosting, as they may pull a Heroku down the line, I would definitely commend them on having a holistic hosting service with many well-thoughtout products that enhance the developer experience

Setting up the built pipeline and connecting it to a Github repository for automatic deployment was simple. Configuring the DNS records to set the domain name was a piece of cake, and Vercel even offer [limited] postgres and redis services. Vercel also allows for preview builds, to view a PR on a staging environment and even using Vercel's Toolbar to leave notes and share feedback with your team

Tooling

Here is a full list of tools and platforms used to build this site:

  • NextJS for routing, SSR and ISR
  • React for UI, no component libs used
  • TailwindCSS
  • MDX - to enable simple markdown posts that get converted into React
  • ThreeJS (just barely)
  • Cloudflare for DNS
  • Giscus for the comment sections under each post
  • The react-latex-next package for LaTeX\LaTeX support
  • Vercel for hosting

Outside of purchasing the domain name, everything required to build and host this site was free.

You can view the full source code for the site here

Why tho...

I wanted a website, also on the rare occasions where a site prompts me for my website or "all other relevant links", I feel bad not providing one.

All posts