What am I up to now?

A bit of introduction

Hello! This is my first now post, I hope it’s entertaining enough, but it will get quite long because it’s the first post and I want to tell some things.

Anyway, I don’t exactly remember what I did to reach the point where here I am writing my own now post in my own portfolio that I am developing and enjoying, but I’m glad I did.

If I remember correctly, I think I was developing the backend of a project I have in the works and got a little burned out, so I switched focus on the frontend. Because at the time I am learning React, I wasn’t sure about which libraries to use. Vite.js is the bundler I’ve used the most and it’s nice, but I think I was curious about bundlers and found Astro, which uses Vite behind the scenes, you can very quickly setup and create static websites, is framework-agnostic, and so on (sweet!).

I then started looking at people’s portfolios, which is something I sometimes like to do.

I just searched on Google and I guess this thread is the one I found where there is a repository of someone’s site that caught my eye made by a person named Eva Decker. I don’t know why I like it so much, I guess it’s because it has a simple user interface, yet it’s appealing, and it’s carefully crafted. The site has some quirky touches, and they also likes piano, feel like I relate with this person, check it out :).

That site has discovered me the “now page”, which I think it’s a very clever concept, which came up by none other than Derek Sivers (gasp). I don’t know him much, but I’ve watched a presentation about a project he created from the ground up, grew big and ended up selling. He also has some very interesting books and is overall a very smart guy. Check out https://nownownow.com/about, it also has a lot of now pages from other people and allows me to easily discover other’s portfolios, nice!

Anyway, Eva’s portfolio was the one that actually inspired me to create my own (I actually did not steal the code). During this journey I also found a spanish content creator that uses and teaches Astro and codes with React often. Check out midudev!

Software development

I am currently studying React. At the start it was very confusing, specially the way the library re-renders components and remembering what all the hooks do, but compared when I started a couple of months ago, I’m doing much better now.

If you have doubts about learning React vs other frontend frameworks, in my opinion, the more you understand it the more you like it, so my recommendation would be to know your requirements or use cases, try some, and choose one that satisfies your needs. Also finding a course or resource that you consider good and helpful is key!

The one that clicked for me was the free Learn React course from Scrimba, it has interactive videos so you can code inside the video very easily, and they are available in Coursera, so if you’re in a company where they have a learning program, they probably can track progress om this course!.

All in all, in the future I’ll try to use both Vue and React in future projects so that I can keep learning from both of them.

Gaming

Warframe remains of my favourite video games. I stopped playing for a year or so, and a few months ago I’ve fallen in love with the game again. I was blown away after watching Tennocon 2023 live at the end. The game has also evolved so much and is even better (not that it wasn’t before). Digital Extremes have put so much passion into the game, you really feel it when you’re playing it.

Recently I also started playing BPM: BULLETS PER MINUTE, and it’s very addicting.

Entertainment

Smosh’s channels videos makes me laugh SO hard. I got introduced to ElSmosh channel by my former best friend back in high school (2013 or so), we watched some videos back in the day, but I stopped watching it until I found out Ian and Anthony bought Smosh back, since then I’ve been watching videos from all their channels, it’s very enjoyable and everyone is so funny.

Piano

I haven’t touched it in like 3 months, there’s so much stuff I want to do that I don’t have time to practice, and I think I’m not motivated enough in summer.

Wrapping up

Thank you for your time, the post got lengthier than I initially expected, but I’ve been very excited and motivated about this portfolio I’m developing, at first I wasn’t very confident, but I guess you have to trust the process and keep changing stuff until you end up with something you like and makes you feel at peace.