This is a very special day for me. I’m so glad that I finally managed to launch my blog. I’ve been thinking about doing it for the past year, and it’s finally here! :D
It’s been a fantastic journey as I chose to build the entire blogging CMS from the ground up on top of NodeJS on the back-end and ReactJS on the front-end. I used the awesome NextJS framework for server-side rendering help. ;)
I’ll talk more in depth about how I created the whole website, what I used for my database and how I manage authentication in a future post. Stay tuned! :D
My History
I started mostly as a front-end developer back in 2013 (HTML/CSS), when a good friend of mine Jeff introduced me to the world of web development. He was the one which guided me at the beginning, and I still can remember the day I added CSS on top of a simple HTML website, it was just wonderful! CSS seemed to give my website superpowers!
Soon after that, I joined Freelancer.com, where I got my first gigs online. I have to admit that some of them weren’t even programming related. xD It was a slow start, but I managed to find few clients which became long term clients. Most of the jobs I did back then were simple CSS modifications or PSD to HTML/CSS conversions. I was using twitter bootstrap 3 for making my life easier. I still use it a lot today.
In those early days, I’ve started using jQuery, long before I got into Vanilla JavaScript. That’s because it seemed so much easier. There were a ton of plugins which could help me get things done faster, but I also started creating my own little plugins.
Reading and studying more about JavaScript I realised that: “Hey… jQuery was built on top of JS, that means that if I learn very well JS, I could build my own jQuery library!” So I started reading, learning, practicing more and more with one of the coolest programming languages, in my opinion, JavaScript.
I joined freecodecamp around a year ago. My intention at that time was to learn Angular, but they were focusing on React, so I had to choose between these 2. It wasn’t easy, as I already knew a little Angular, but one day a client asked me if I know React, and I didn’t know, and I told him. His reply was:_ “That’s too bad. React is the new trend, you should learn it!”_
Started looking into it and I realised that it was a very good choice because I really love working with React now. It has a very simple and intuitive API, which makes it easy to learn.
Becoming more passionate about JavaScript, I had also to learn NodeJS to enhance my “powers”. Which was really helpful. I even created few Full Stack applications using the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node), and I’m planning to build more.
The blog’s purpose
As I said above, I’ve been thinking about becoming a blogger for some time now, and the biggest reason I want to do it is because I love creating, and this is the good way of sharing this passion with other fellow web programmers. I’d hope that I could give back to the community something, as I learned a lot from others.
To be honest, I was always passionate about how things were created. A fancy slider, a nice smooth animated form, etc, and on my spare time, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how they did it, and pushed myself to the limit to build that app or plugin, or whatever it was, from scratch. This is what I’ll be doing mostly on this blog.
Another reason is that I am very confident that I’ll learn a lot by doing this, and it will help me also on the long run!
Want to help?
Here I created a google form, where I’d like you to tell me what would you be interested in learning HOW TO do. I’ll collect the data, and depending on your answers, I’ll choose a topic and start working on it.
Thank you for spending your time reading this post, I hope I will bring more value in your life with these posts.
Be blessed! :)