New Web Portfolio

Now live at: web.stephentvedt.com

Keeping in the spirit of good code and separation of concerns I have also launched an entirely separate web portfolio. This showcases web projects and sites I have worked on either personally or professionally. Creating this new portfolio also gave me a practical application to stretch my legs with a few new tools, libraries and frameworks:

Build Tools

create-react-app (tool which reduces react specific setup of webpack, etc) _Firebase _(Google’s solution for deploying all types of apps. Free for static sites)

Frameworks

React Material-UI (Google’s Component Library for React) react-slick (React implementation of Slick Carousel)

Why These?

I chose to use create-react-app to quickly get a new project in React started up and I noticed they have lots of other interesting tools built in and I had to do zero configuration! More on this tool in future posts.

Material UI I chose because it was not fully matured when I previously wanted to use it for a work project. We proceeded using a third-party library called React-Toolbox in it’s place and has had some growing pains particularly with Redux-Forms. Been a while since I used React-Toolbox but Material-UI seems great so far. One complaint is that it seems unclear how to expand upon their icon-font (I pulled in the github icon, which I poached from their documentation). Also, no class names are added to some of their components by default which would be nice to apply custom styling without having to add my own classes. Or worse, as their examples show having your styles live in your js. Yuck, I’m gonna go take a shower now.

Firebase has been something I’ve been wanting to try because I know it provides free hosting for static sites and includes SSL, custom domains and future proofing/scaling abilities. I have really liked this as it’s a nice one-liner to deploy once you have their CLI installed. I have also used Heroku for a past project and Heroku can get costly very quickly if you want 100% uptime and start introducing databases.

That’s all for now. If you would like to see the full source code for the implementation of all the above check it out on Github at: https://github.com/stvedt/st-portfolio