Okay, I have finally developed a somewhat decent blog - Always Creating. In this post, I will discuss the motivation behind creating it, the process of building it, and what I have learned while improvising it for a month now.

Motivation

The plan for creating a blog had always been there. Being a CS student I was invariably motivated by developers who had crafted their engaging blogs (Dan Abramov, Thomas frank, Tania Rascia ..). As I started reading more and more books, I decided to write a blog on medium to see how reading has affected my communication skills. Positive feedback boosted my confidence to write more blogs. I directed this positive zest towards creating my blog.

How?

I had some idea of React (had spent a few days learning it 😅 ). I had heard something called Gatsbyjs a popular react framework is great for developing blogs. So a youtube search and I landed on a tutorial for making blogs using gatsby. In gatsby you don't need any backend, you can store all your blogs in Markup files. So simple 😍!!. I made a bare-bones blog site using the tutorial. From there, I learned bit by bit (Graphql image loading, adding tags, more components ...), and incrementally refined the site.

Takeaway

The blog has helped me practice and learn Reactjs concepts and pushed me to deep dive into Graphql (Lately I have been playing with it on a few extensive projects). The blog has been a great source of pride and massive learning and practice ground. Whenever I feel uncertain or weary I open this repository and start contributing and tweaking, and then I feel more content.

Technical learnring

I learned about creating pages from data. I learned to write a template js file, which creates a similar page layout for each blog but has data of respective blogs. Then I learned moderately about styling webpages, stealing & creating designs :), logo making. I gained practical experience of the power of react components :) I have yet to see gatsby Bootcamp tutorial and learn a lot more.