Why
Initially, it was this blog article by Jamie Tanna that resonated with me and got me thinking about creating my own site. As well as being a good citizen of the web, I have three main motivations:
- refining/improving my front-end skills;
- the indieweb movement;
- keeping a track of what I've been up to
Also, personal sites are all the rage these days!
Sharpen the saw
My plan for 2020 is to focus on becoming a specialist front-end developer - and there are a lot of new features and APIs being shipped these days. Having a personal site will hopefully push me to try some of these shiny new things. At the time of writing, this site (progressively!) uses native web components and the web animations API.
Indieweb
The indieweb sounds pretty cool, and ticks a lot of boxes for me. Even as a reasonably seasoned developer though, I find the sheer amount of concepts rather overwhelming — thankfully sites like indiewebify.me simplify things a bit. It'll be a continual work in progress, but as with most things on the web, a fun challenge.
Self-documentation
There is also the additional benefit of having somewhere just to dump stuff. For example, I am planning to keep track of my favourite albums as I discover them, and I (very) occasionally like to think I can learn to make art and I like the idea of having a decentralised place where I can store what I make and keep track of what I've done.
There is also the subject of blogging, or just sharing generally. I've read so many times that is a good thing to blog about web dev stuff, but I've always been too introverted to do it. While I don't really agree with the term or the connotations, I can probably be categorised as a Dark-Matter Developer. I've read plenty of blogs, been to conferences, looked at loads of talented people's work but never felt like I could contribute anything meaningful. Well, going forward I'm taking the approach of “Just Write” and see what happens. At the very least it will serve as a useful reminder for future me, and help me focus my thoughts in a vaguely coherent way!
Bonus points
The bottom line is that I'm hoping to enjoy it. It will be nice to revisit why I enjoy working in this industry and to experiment and challenge myself on the way. All in my safe little corner of the world wide web.