I’m so glad to announce that my blog has finally landed and is live. Ha ha! Needs no announcement, you see it! It’s really been a journey finally coming to own a blog and be a lord of my own on the internet rather than a tenant. Just as owning something of yours feels, the liberty, the freedom, being the master, therefore I dictate my own rules and I make things look and feel the way I want them. The feeling is never different, but I relish having the feeling when I can.
Oh! Let me clear this. I titled this post “Building My Second Gatsby Blog”, yet I claim that I just became “a lord of my own on the internet”. I am not a technophobe of some sort, I’ve long used the internet as it lived or as I lived (if probably the internet lived before me). Since I said “Building My Second Gatsby Blog” which means this isn’t my first. It’s the first I ever built for myself since I landed in the tech niche / industry. I once had one on Blogger, I used to write on Medium and I actively write on Dev. But what has all those made me? A tenant.
The time to commit to doing it earlier was a commodity out of stock for me. Now I’m happy to say: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my housewarming. Should I have said blogwarming? Oh, who’d had thought domainwarming sounds cool! This is my domain and I mean it in every way possible, DNS-wise and literally.
Let’s cut the crap
Secret is out! I built this blog with Gatsby and damnnnn Gatsby is dope! I knew since my first time using Gatsby that it was dope, but the feeling is on a whole new level this time. Although I hate doing one thing twice except for some good reason. I initially wanted Next.js, but then I thought if I wanted to get up to speed, I’d better used Gatsby.
What’s involved?
Well, nothing quite much. Nothing more than you’d expect. As we all know, Gatsby is another extra layer on top of React that takes the full advantage of React, GraphQL and Nodejs to function as an SSG.
- Built with Gatsby
- Coded with React in Javascript
- Styled with CSS / SCSS
- Themeing done with CSS custom properties
- Content writing done with Markdown and MDX
- Source management with Git on Github
- Deployed on Netlify
- Serverless with Firebase
- Running in your browser
I felt like doing something a little differently so I ditched Styled Components for SCSS. For the serverless, I wanted something which I could have more control over and that’s definitely not Netlify Functions, which itself is an abstraction around AWS Lambda to make it a one-click setup, so I went with Firebase since I’m familiar with it too. Netlify Functions is beautiful, easy setup and no complexities, yeah, I use it in some other projects — different projects require different stacks.
The purpose of this blog
There is a purpose for this blog and without it I shouldn’t be here. I hope to reach out and connect with more people through this medium. I want to actively contribute to the developer community, by sharing what I know, doing some stunts, creating tutorials and talk about what I do, every step I take, in my journey through the industry and share my progress with projects and also talk about my products as I make them.