benlammers / portfolio

A static Gatsby application connected to Sanity CMS to showcase my experience and projects

Portfolio

Table of Contents

• Purpose
• Description
• Tech Stack
• Getting Started
• Challenges
• Possible Improvements

Purpose

The purpose of this site is to provide a platform that represents my current skill set and showcases my experience and projects to future employers and other developers.

Description

This project was developed to help add to my online presence as a web developer. It also gave me an oppurtunity to try integrating a headless CMS (Sanity) with Gatsby which I had been hoping to do for a while. This allows me to easily edit the sites content as I develop my skills further and produce more projects.

The portfolio holds the following content:

• Links to my socials
• Describes my current skill set
• Highlights some of my recent projects with links and descriptions
• Provides a timeline of other notable items such as courses I have taken

Syntax FM

My previous portfolio was reviewed by the guys on the Syntax podcast!

• Listen to the episode here (11:31)
• View the version they reviewed

I highly recommend all of their episodes.

Tech Stack

• Gatsby
• Tailwind
• Sanity

Getting Started

Visit the hosted site

Challenges

The greatest challenge of this project was finalizing a design that I felt was aesthetically appeasing and correctly highlighted the content I wished to display. I have a great appreciation for design vs development after seeing how long it took to design the different sections of the site. I spent many hours playing around in Figma and browsing other developers portfolios for inspiration.

Possible Improvements

Dynamic Themes

I played with the idea of adding dynamic themes. One idea for this was to add a color selector fixed to the top right corner of the viewport. Upon selecting a color a circle would expand over the site with its origin being the color selector. The colors of the site would then transition as the edge of the circle touches them leaving the site with a new theme. I played with using canvas for this and other solutions but got stuck down a rabbit hole, spending too much time, and decided to forego this in the current version.

Add a blog

A typical addition to a web developer's personal site is a blog. This is something I wish to add one day. Including reflections on my journey learning and working in web development as well as life lessons in general. However, as I do not have many ideas yet and do not wish to have a stale blog for now I am choosing to have none.