Building a new portfolio site

I’m doing it! It’s time for a new portfolio website.

After seven years of dedicated service, it’s time to retire my current site. It’s gone through a number of iterations to get to where it is today. The first version went live in 2018. I built it by hand using React for the frontend and WordPress as its backend. At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate what was involved with building the frontend of a blog from the ground up. It was a great learning experience.

That brings me to today and why I’m doing this all over again. I’m ready to learn some more. This time, I’d like to take a different approach and create my own WordPress theme. I don’t know whether I’ll make it a public theme yet but I like having the option to do that if I want. The idea that other people might pick my theme for their site is appealing but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I have to build this thing first and I’ve never done it before.

Lucky for me, I have two things going for myself. 1. I work at Automattic. The company behind WordPress. I’m surrounded by experts and the technology that makes WordPress possible. 2. We are in the age of AI where the learning curve for this kind of thing is super low. I hope it is anyways.

I have been making some good progress on the design. So much so that I’m ready to start the building. My first stop is WordPress studio:

A tool for local WordPress development. I only just downloaded it and can tell already how helpful it is. It’s got AI baked into it and the setup was as simple as it gets. I still remember the days of setting up a computer for local development. It was so painful getting PHP and mySQL running. Thankfully, that’s all in the past. Time to get building. Wish me luck and stay tuned for updates!