Why, when there are tons of platforms and libraries to choose from to develop a personal site, and tons of readily available free-resources to host them on, do you create an entire full-stack application from the ground up just for your personal site? Because I can.

The Situation

My old site was probably created in four hours, maybe less. And most of that time was spent redesigning the layout over and over again until I was satisfied with the look of it. However, I was ultimately never a fan of it and I don't think any visitors were all too impressed with it either. This, however, was a problem as I began to apply to jobs and notice a decent amount of traffic to my site. Unfortunately, at that time I was preoccupied with finishing up my graduate studies at NYU and I had neither the time nor energy to refactor it.

Old yegor.codes landing page

Well, now I have finally survived graduate school and entered a new chapter of my life: unemployement adulthood. And with this new free time on my hands and the crushing anxiety of artificial intelligence making employment obsolete, I decided to expand my tech stack by taking a deeper dive into web development.

yegor.codes Reborn

The Old Site's Tech Stack

• Typescript
• React
• Redux
• Material UI
• Firebase

The original site was powered almost entirely by React. It was a single-page application that connected directly to Google's Firebase for the backend. Most assets and data was static as I didn't even have a chance to move it to a proper database for storage. So it was nothing more than a glorified HTML file that I fragmented into React components and glued together visually with Material UI.

The New One

• NextJS
• Typescript
• React
• Tailwind CSS
• MongoDB

World, say hello to yegor.codes Mark II (there will be many more, I'm sure, as there is a brutal fight between my restlessness and my desire for perfection). This new site is primarily powered by NextJS with front-end components handled by React and the backend via Node. I decided to make this version of my site more permanent, intending for it to be built upon moving forward. Thus, I decided to separate as many concerns as possible into individual compartments that can be swapped out later. That extended to my desire to have complete control over the site from a full-stack perspective. Firebase-specific calls were swapped out for Node RESTful API calls, static information was replaced with a MongoDB cluster, and slowly, over time, no specific software had complete reigns over the project.

This was just a brief post welcoming you to the new site. For an in-depth technical discussion of the site, please check out the Yegor Codes writeup on the portfolio page.

As for you old site...so long sweet prince, you will not be missed.