My Garden 🌷

Welcome to my digital garden! 🌱🌻

I've always loved personal websites, so I've been pretty happy about the recent digital garden resurgence.

I've had personal websites before, but I didn't really have a vision for what I wanted them to be. I was also making them when I was first learning to code, so developing felt cumbersome and not condusive to creativity simply because I was new to programming. They were more learning projects than spaces where I could be creative.

Now with years of development under my belt, I'm excited to return to the personal website/digital garden landscape and have some fun with it without the constant roadblocks that come with first learning to code.

The Current

I put together this application in a couple of days. I was, and still am, most excited about building out my own little backend for it. I thought about using some kind of CMS, but ultimately wanted the flexibility of my own API. I was employed as a Frontend Engineer for the last 2.5 years, so it's been really fun to get back into backend development.

For the API I used NodeJS, Express, Sequelize, and Postgres. It's deployed using Railway.

For the frontend, I went back and forth between using React and Vue. To stay consistent with the ethos of this project being a place for me to be creative and have fun, I ultimately went with Vue because it's my favorite in terms of developer experience. With a career in web development, I am never going to be lacking in React work, so might as well use this personal space to develop with what feels most natural to me.

For the frontend client I used Vue3, Vite, and TypeScript. I'm using Markdown to write these posts. It's deployed using Vercel.

The Vision

As of right now, this place is pretty barebones. I wanted to get something up quick even if it's was super simple.

Speaking of simple, I love 90s-style web design, so while I'll tweak the design of this application over time, it will probably always resemble the simplicity of old websites.

A characteristic of a digital garden is some kind of non-standard/creative way of linking content. For now, this feed is just listed by created date. However I'll probably implement some kind of tagging system or similar in the future to move away from the standard list by date format.

I have a bunch of nitty-gritty things on the immediate roadmap for this application like a photo upload endpoint, post update and delete endpoints, better styling on these posts and homepage, RSS, etc etc.

Ultimately, my general plan for this garden is to write about whatever I'm working on or is on my mind. It will probably be heavy on programming content, but I also would love to use this space to share non-coding projects and thoughts as well.

Inspo

As I mentioned in the beginning, I've always loved personal websites. I'll be making another post dedicated to my favorite personal websites at some point. As a little taste test for that post, I was looking specifically at a handful of digital gardens for inspiration while building this garden:

• Maggie Appleton (because of course)
• Neil Mather (obsessed with his design)
• 100 Rabbits (one of my favorite gardens of all time, such interesting content)

Thanks for reading! 👋🌱