I'm so excited about migrating my static site to Gatsby, that I'm not sure where to begin to share with you how I got here. But like any good story I will start from the beginning. The previous version of my site was built with a static site generator referred to as esds-build. ESDS-build was created by an agency called EightShapes. I met the EightShapes team and started working with their design system tools while working on a design system called LUCI. ESDS-build is awesome and it's perfect for building design system documenation sites and you can use it for simple static sites, which in the end I guess that's how I would describe my site, simple. If I'm being honest, the reason I wanted to switch is that I wanted to learn something new.

Learning something new

In September of 2019 I took a new role as a UI Developer with IBM after working for close to 6 years at NetApp in their Digital Marketing department as a UX Web Developer. My primary focus at NetApp was prototyping new designs for their dotcom site and working on the frontend of their design system. While I learned a lot there and enjoyed the work at times, our technology stack was quickly becoming outdated. We were still using an old version of jQuery, a clunky enterprise CMS that used C Sharp on the backend, and our prototyping and design system was built using static HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. And there's nothing really wrong our bad about that stack, but things change quickly in the web development world and we were not changing quickly at NetApp.

Developers were exploring and coming up with other ways to develop websites and applications, such as the Jam Stack (JavaScript, APIs and Markup). And at the time we were too heavily invested in our workflow. After almost 6 years working in the Digital Marketing department that was driven more so by campaigns, I realized I was becoming ancient and a bit outdated. That's when I decided to learn React and exploring Angular. After a month or two of learning React on my own, that's when I knew it was time for a new journey.

Hello React

At IBM I work on the frontend team for a hybrid cloud application that is built with React, NextJs, CSS-In-JSS, Node, and Express. It's basically a fullstack JavaScript development environment, and it has reminded me why I like the frontend. It's a perfect blend of technology and design. We also use Gatsby for our documentation site. When you work as part of an agile application team, you take on small stories that introduce you to a lot of new problems to solve and components to build, and working in the environment has sparked my interest in rebuilding my site in the same stack that I use at work and to make plans to learn more about the Jam Stack and design systems in my spare time.

Starting side projects

Becuase I consider myself somewhat of a newbie and I don't always get the opportunity to build cool stuff at my day job, I decided to work on some side projects that I've been thinking about, such as building a Gatsby theme for design systems. I invision it being similar to what we did for LUCI, I will build components that help developers document their component library. Some examples of components include a code-example-pair, a tint-stack, or an icon-swatch. The whole point of this project is so that I can learn something new and keep my development skill sharp.

My other side project is my personal site. I want it to be a place where I can keep a portfolio and case study of my development and design projects. I also want it to be a place where I can write and share about what I am learning. When I'm not working, being a mom, and working out, I spend the rest of time going through tutorials from developers like Wes Bos, Tyler McGinnis and Scott Tolinski. I love their teaching style because it's very hands-on and they even encourage you to try things on your own. It's those things that I try on my own that I want to start commiting to a GitHub repo and writing a post about what I learned. In addition, I also have a very strong interest in the UI design and I think eventually I would like to make the switch to full-time UI designer. So as I work my way the the Learn UI Design course, I will blog about my experience.

My story

So there it is, that's my story about how I got to this point. And I'm so excited to continue my journey in development and design, and having a digital home to document to my progress. It should be fun!