Experience building NextJS, Tailwind Portfolio.

Introduction

I have had the same portfolio for quite a while now. I made it in a hurry because a recruiter requested for it. It wasn't shabby; I think it's one of the best websites I've made. but, it didn't reflect my personality.
The design was from a designer I found on dribble. They told me I could use it so far I credited them. You can check out the site here

It worked out okay, but the recruiter ghosted me which sucked. Since then, I've thought about making v2 of my portfolio.

v2 would reflect me more and give people an inkling into my inner life. It is precisely why the back button is positioned where it is lol.

The process

I had a couple of experiene with building Client-side React apps and some server side apps with Gatsby but I hadn't tried Next properly.

To get a handle of how things worked in Next land, I went through Fireship's crash course - absolutely delightful - and then the NextJS docs.

A bit of a segue: I really appreciate folks who take the time to write amazing docs. It is no mean feat to organize and categorize text without making it a hassle.

A quick shoutout to the folks responsible for the docs of Ethereum, VueJS, Prisma and NextJS. Your docs are a delight to read.

My goal is to be able to write documentation as well as that as I continue my career.

Back to the portfolio: The NextJS tutorial is actually pretty good. It helped me with setting up the boiler plate. I had to use TS instead of JS because TS is awesome, but apart from that, it wasn't too difficult.

I had to setup Tailwind for styling, matter and Remark for parsing my MDX into html file. It was worth learning.

Issues

No web project is without it's issues. I had a hard time styling things the way I wanted to look. My blog is very inspired by Joe's. I decided to add my own touch on things which you can see here and there.

Formatting with Tailwind's prose plugin also added a layer of complexity I didn't expect. I am gonna be learning as I build.

The goal is to become more proficient with MDX in conjuction with the Tailwind prose plugin.

Conclusion

NextJS is incredibly pleasing to use. I wish I started earlier.

All in All, I didn't create this blog in Astro as I initially planned but it's all good because I got to experience NextJS.