What motivated me to create this blog website? Actually, it never began as a blog website. It all started when I created my first independently made website Average_Satti. This was a CRUD application integrated with JWT authentication( not Firebase cause I wanted to learn about JWT) and Google Drive API. Though it may seem very basic to me at this time, I was pretty excited about it. But during the beta testing of the site (yes, I'm being technical), I realised that I'm lacking the most basic project that a web developer has. That is his own, made using the bits and pieces of HTML and CSS knowledge gathered till now, portfolio website.

So I began to develop the portfolio website until I came across this Medium article. Forget about the getting-the-jobs part, I personally love to write about the kinds of stuff that all come to my mind (the reason why I joined TSA, and partly because I couldn't make it into TLS 😢). The most appealing thing was as if I was looking back to the time when I read those blogs. So, I decided to begin writing blogs. But I needed a platform for it. So while developing the portfolio website, I decided to make a blogging platform alongside. And the cherry on the cake is to integrate it with my portfolio website.

"Every Pro once started as a Noob"

Truly said in the medium blog, I faced a lot of difficulties in making the website. Not having prior knowledge about SEO, static-site generators, headless CMS, webhooks and other kinds of stuff, it took me a lot of time to pick the right stack for me. I finally decided to with the following stack:

• GatsbyJS: Because I had experience working in ReactJS, the only new thing I needed was to generate the pages programmatically.

• Sanity-io: Had many options for headless CMS, but the flexibility it provides for the sanity studio schema design and Graphql database impressed me.

• Vercel: For hosting the website, I thought to rather go with Vercel than Netlify.

But the thing that was the most irritating was I didn't know I needed a webhook between Sanity and Vercel for automatic deployments. I nearly spent 2 hours configuring this😖. And finally, I had this site done and working, and I'm quite proud of myself.

Also, Shivam Kumar Jha's site (thealphadollar.me) and Brittany Chiang's site (brittanychiang.com) were quite helpful in making this site and giving me the ideas for the frontend development of it (you'll probably see it😂).

P.S. I later migrated to Contentful from Sanity because of the simplistic schema creation and overall UI. Also for their preview API :)

Signing off,

Hasta Luego!!