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 /\  |__) |  \  /\  |__) | /  ` ' /__`    | |\ |  |  |__  |__) |\ | |__   |     |__| /  \  |\/| |__  
/~~\ |  \ |__/ /~~\ |  \ | \__,   .__/    | | \|  |  |___ |  \ | \| |___  |     |  | \__/  |  | |___ 

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How I made this page?

Hi! I've decided to start this blog with post about technical side of this whole page, but also how I work on my side-projects in general and why I do them in a way I do. Maybe it'll inspire you to do side-projects similar way ;)

Ask yourself one important question: What do you like to do in your life? And start doing it.

This crudely translated quote from old Polish comedy "Chłopaki nie płaczą" is actually very accurate about my approach on fun projects. I like working on them in such a way that enables me to start implementing various elements as soon as possible, without many prerequisites. Not much planning, no complicated tech stack. Just get an editor open and start writing.

I remember situation, when I short period I and my work colleague started working on our portfolio pages. He started from creating project in Figma, selecting framework etc. I've opened an editor, wrote page in plain HTML, sparkled with some CSS, bought hosting, domain, uploaded page using FTP and was done. As far as I know, his page never went out of Figma project stage and was not alone. I've seen countless memes about not finishing side-projects. Was his project fun for him? Probably. I'm not here to say to anyone: "You loser, you can't even finish what you've started, lol xD". I'm writing this post to show different perspective. This is not project in some corporation where everything has to be planned from A to Z. This is about fun of creating something that works and is built simple.

Tech stack or lack there of

This page is written using only HTML and CSS. Maybe I'll add some JS to it. Not 69 heavy frameworks. No, just plain JS, doing exactly what I need. RSS feed is also hand-written.

I'm not even using Hugo, which is very good static site generator that I've previous experience with. However, I decided against this, because I wanted to create this page from ground up, having a total control on how it looks, so to use Hugo I would have to learn it's templating system, which would make me probably abandon this page before I even seriously started doing it. To make things worse, it would restrict me in some ways, such as adding images to posts on my blog!

This approach provides me very basic, but functional and stable platform that I can build on. When I get tired of manually updating my rss file I can write bash script that will do it for me. On the other hand, nothing will stop working just because version of X became incompatible with Y.

Is this best written page?

Hell no xD It's code has some junk in it for sure. ASCII art logos are probably accessibility hell. But this is not competition and I can improve code later, when I'll have basics done.

Making your own thing

Let's go back to more hmm... ideological part of this post. There is one more thing that I would like to talk about. I like creating my projects from ground up for one more reason: Awareness that I've written as big part of code as possible. That is is mine, not some programming couterpart Lego building from set.