About This Website 💻

It should come with little surprise that React is used as the client side JS library for this website. Component views and efficient state management with automated rerendering were nobrainer reasons for choosing this library as I wanted to minimize overhead as much as possible. Moreover, it is the JS library I am most familiar with - so it seems to be the best option (for now).

I've come to have Next.js at the front of my mind whenever I intend on create any sort of non-SPA based website. I've come to make React the optimal choice for web development for myself - but it is not without flaws on its own. A lot of features come out of the box with Next.js that you would normally have to manually configure - such as server side rendering, JS bundling, routing, and more. I would much rather use a framework like Next.js to enjoy complex features like that with little headache.

I had a decision before I started building the website that is very crucial to the feel of the website as well as my sanity for when I completed the site. I knew from the jump that I did not want to just use raw CSS - primarily because I wanted to challenge myself to use new tools and make the burden of styling easier. I had a goal in mind when selecting Tailwind CSS, and that was to avoid unnecessary complexity. I decided against using any preprocessor like Sass since it would likely be too overkill for this. I ended up deciding upon Tailwind just because of how easy it is to style components right in jsx files and how simple breakpoint changes are to implement. I also used Mui for premade components that I have little interest in creating manually - such as the accordion you are reading from right now :)

Vercel seemed like the appropriate choice for hosting and deployment for this web app, given that it fell in line with my principle of little configuration. Seeing that Vercel is the creator and maintainer of Next.js, it is evident that deploying a Next.js app on a serverless Vercel service would be simple. Vercel is akin to App Engine for GCP and Elastic Beanstalk for AWS. Moreover, Vercel offers out-of-the-box CI/CD with automatic deployment in response to GitHub pushes.

With any modern project - it is arguably naive to not choose a versioning system like Git and a source code hoster like GitHub. Especially since I intend to make changes to the site as time goes on, it is crucial that there is a robust VCS that exists as a backbone for the project. Moreover, the integration with Vercel for automatic deployments streamlines work significantly.