Case Study: My Portfolio Site

My resume + portfolio static Jekyll site built on Docker-containerized Ruby with Liquid templates for scripted insertion of YAML data into Markdown pages. Deployed on Netlify for CI/CD.

Overview

Tech Stack

Motivation

Features and Functionality

Technical Choices

• I wanted to use a well-developed static site generator, so Jekyll made the most sense to use (what happened to Hugo?)

• I’m using the Chirpy theme for Jekyll because it comes with search, a pretty default appearance, Mermaid and LaTeX support, strucutred JSON for SEO, and other awesome features. I’m a lazy developer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• This was my first time working with Dev Containers, and wow, I love them. A portable, isolated dev environment with programmatic dependency install through Docker, GUI editor install, and extensions through devcontainer.json? Sign me up.

• I also learned SASS through customization of the default theme to add the Farcaster social button, and my Liquid template for auto-generated resume skill tags.

• I was familiar with Markdown before starting this project but YAML, SASS, and Ruby + Jekyll were new to me.

• It’s based in Ruby, which I was not familiar with and that unfamiliarity slowed down getting the development environment set up. If I were to make my portfolio site again, I would stick to a JavaScript framework (probably Astro) to leverage my experience with JS instead of learning Ruby from scratch.

Challenges and Solutions

Lessons Learned

Future Considerations

Links