Hi to all you readers! I see you stumbled across my little blog from some distant part of the internet, whereever that may have been. But now that you're here, relax for a bit and see what this blog has to offer right now, and new ideas I have planned for it in the future :)

Creating With A Purpose

I created this blog for two reasons. The first was to create a site using the JAMstack design philosophy. In a nutshell, using the JAMstack (Javascript, APIs, and Markdown) allows you to create beautiful static sites without being slowed down by and dependent on monolithic services like Wordpress or Drupal. Since the files for the website are pre-generated, it allows for them to be hosted on a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which can dramatically speed up your site's load times since user's receive the files from the server nearest to their location instead of a main central server.

The second, and more important, reason was to give back to the community and teach people about a variety of topics, including Front-end/Back-end development, creative coding, and machine learning. I was largely self-taught through online courses, books, and blogs (shoutout to CSS-Tricks), so I am intimately aware of what works for teaching and what leaves the reader more confused than when they started. I'm going to take what I learned and apply it to this blog to (hopefully) break down difficult/confusing concepts into easier to digest bits of information. This will require some help on your part as well! If I don't explain something well-enough or don't go in-depth, I hope that you'll shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment with some constructive criticism about how I can improve!

Features for the Future

Currently, the blog is lacking a few core features that should be present to provide a better User Experience, namely a search feature and a log-in mechanism. The search feature will become more of a necessity as the blog grows and the content becomes more difficult to sort through, but getting a head-start on it is important. Since this blog is built with the JAMstack philosophy and doesn't have a massive database backing it, the search feature will need to be implemented using an API, and luckily Contentful (the Content Management System I use for this blog) has that! When the search feature is ready, I plan to make a post detailing the process of implementing the feature using React and Node.js.

A user authentication service is also little more complicated to implement without having a database to store user data, but we can write a Node app pretty easily using a package like Passport.js. This allows the site to authenticate using Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any combination of the many services already available. Like the search feature, you can expect a blog post in the future detailing the process and pitfalls I came across during its implementation.

Until Next Time

Thanks for taking the time to read through the post (I'm assuming you did since you're reading this right now) and I hope you enjoyed it. Please like, comment, and subscribe Just kidding, but please spread the word about this blog on Twitter and Facebook (or whatever social media platform is the most popular these days :P). It takes very little effort and has a potentially massive impact by helping someone out there learn the last piece of information they needed to finish the project they're working on!