Building my Personal Website

To navigate through the current job market as a new grad with little work experience, I realized that I needed more online presence and so I chose to finally make my own personal website to show off my finished projects. The first step was to figure out what tech stack I wanted to use.

My criteria was something that was both easy to host on github pages and something lightweight that allowed me to write simple blog posts using Markdown. As I recently started investing more time in learning React, I saw that both Gatsby and Next.js were both popular front-end frameworks that I could build using React. I was looking through different articles comparing the two frameworks, and I felt like I couldn't decide between the two just from reading. I tried both tutorials to see what they offered and to feel out the general development experience.

While trying out the Gatsby tutorial, I went through the basics like learning the file structure, where components and styling go, etc. I ended up stopping at the section where I had to set up GraphQL as I quickly realized that I didn't need my blog data using that functionality.

The Next.js tutorial was much more user-friendly with an interactive introduction and great feedback at each step for their features. From how the pages structure was organized to the styling using CSS modules, I decided that Next.js was the right choice. Best of all, the tutorial even included setting up a blog using only Markdown files, so I made quick reference to the tutorial code and started building immediately.

Gatsby vs Next.js is all over the internet discussions with various pros and cons to compare each other, but sometimes the tutorial experience is what makes or breaks an interested developer's choice.