First Post

May 21st, 2021

Welcome to my blog! 👋

A GIF of Pikachu drinking a beverage while floating in a pool inflatable

The purpose of this blog is to provide a space for me to express thoughts, opinions, and learnings as I try to become a better software developer. Writing these pieces provides potential value for those who visit and serves as reference for future me to reflect.

If you come across information that seems wrong or want to open discussion on anything you can reach me on Twitter (@therealkevinzoo) and I'll respond!

For now let's go over the process of how I created this site.

How this site was built

This site was created with Next.js and deployed (for free) on Vercel. I followed the guide at https://nextjs.org/learn/basics/create-nextjs-app, which is intuitive enough to complete even if I didn't have React experience. The dyanmic routes and static generation features of Next.js are great to work with, and I am excited to learn more about the framework.

I'm no designer, but Figma is my tool of choice when I want to express my passion for graphic design. The design was kept simple for two reasons:d

removing distractions from content to keep the experience straightforward
a lack of experience and knowledge in doing anything more complicated

The most complex "design choice" I made in the last iteration of my personal site was slide animations after the page finished loading (seen below). Truthfully I wanted to learn about libraries like Three.js and leverage those for a wow factor, but that will have to be shelved for a future iteration of this site.

A GIF of a website in which the content appears via sliding animation

Now I can focus on writing good and meaningful content, which is the exact reason I started this blog!