A few months ago, a friend asked me what web framework I use for my website and how I would decrease the latency inbetween database calls. After a short pause and a questioning facial expression from my part, he grinningly asked if I knew what he meant and if I even had a personal website. Although it’s not that of an uncommon state to be in, website-less that is, I unfortunately had to admit my shortcomings… but already in that moment I decided to build one from scratch.
During that time, I also started to use GitHub more frequently, and soon learned that it offered free hosting of websites through GitHub Pages. This presented a great opportunity to experiment a bit, which ended in a few projects you can find in my GitHub repo collection, like zurich-lens or dm-sheets.
My portfolio website was still only an idea however. It took quite some time to think about design, content, and presentation order. What should my message be? Did I want to lay focus on myself, or my work, or interests?
Meanwhile, I started to look into Jekyll, a ruby based website generator. It helps with all the pesky details, and enables the programmer to concentrate his attention on the important stuff, content and message. It creates simple, and static websites or blogs, with just a few tricks. It also acts as a Markdown and Sass compiler, a cascading style sheet language, and sort of an indented version to CSS. And the best part, GitHub Pages are powered by Jekyll.
It seemed like everything was decided, just the work had be done and the tools had to be learned… and a few months later, i.e. today, the result can be inspected here.