How & why this site was born

My previous portfolio website was built back in 2016. The website was built from the ground up using PHP, HTML, and CSS. The design for the previous website was created from scratch using Photoshop. For a while now i’ve been threating to update my portfolio website to utilise modern technology such as static site generation (SSG) and serverless web hosting. I wanted a website that was simple, clean, fast and easy to maintain. For the new website I also wanted to include the functionality for blogs that can be written in Markdown for easy writing and publishing of research and thoughts.

After some static site generation research I decided to go with Jekyll, an open source static sites generator written in Ruby, and leveraging klisé, a simple Jekyll theme. Jekyll is a static site generator that is written in Ruby and is very flexible and easy to customise. I’ve built SSG websites in the past with Gatsby however I felt that Jekyll would be a better fit for this project due to its blog functionality.

The site is hosted on Vercel. I chose Vercel because it’s a modern serverless platform that is easy to setup and has a one click web hosting option that just works.