Background

This is my (Andrew Poe) personal site. While it does contain my resume, and a more detailed breakdown of my work history, its primary focus is not necessarily as a portfolio site. Having as a visible example of my work IS important, since I'm unlikely to be able to show off anythiong I do on the job, but this site is really intended to be a kind of long lasting coding playground for me. The web isn't going anywhere, and neither am I, so this site should be a living project, evolving as the web and its technologies do.

The site

This site is a Next.js site, which by extension means it's using React. I'm using TypeScript everywhere, both because it's just a big improvement over vanilla JavaScript, and because at my previous job I didn't get to use it outside some small collaboration work I did. We had something like 100k+ lines of JavaScript in my product, and no free time to even contemplate that kind of switch. Now, one of the things that makes JavaScript particularly easy to deal with is that is doesn't have types, so there have obviously been bumps in the road related to typings. One in particular that was interesting was related to the library (next-page-transitions) I wanted to use for animating the Next.js page transitions. The library did everything I wanted and was easy to use, but it was also very dead, and had no types for me to use. There also didn't appear to be a good alternative in the Next.js ecosystem at the time, so I decided to just rewrite it from scratch, using the dead library as a base to guide the business logic. I initially tried simply writing types for it and calling it a day, but that ended up being a big enough PITA that I just went forward with the full rewrite. If the source library was much larger I definitely wouldn't have done this, but since it was fairly small it was definitely worth it. It was also excellent practice for me for setting up a very complicated component using React Hooks, as I also didn't have a chance to use those on my old project.

I've put a fair bit of time into making sure the site follows responsive deisgn, and has a good user experience whether on a widescreen desktop, or a small mobile screen. That includes both testing as numerous different resolutions on each page I developed, as well as quick real world testing on the Android and Apple devices I have access to. I was able to discover a few UI bugs that only cropped up on on the actual mobile hardware and fix them, but my access to hardware is limited, so if you see any particularly egregious bugs, and have some spare time, shoot me an email about it. I'm always interested in feedback.

Currently this site doesn't have a backend / database associated with it, as I currently have no need for either yet. I'll be using a Postgres database when I need one however. As for the backend stack, I guess that determination will come down to what I really need. If it's a minimal requirement I could go serverless with Lambdas, or something like a Spring boot project if I forsee a larger footprint requirement.