About this Site

When I first started this site back in 1998, it was just a simple landing page hosted on my free Earthlink account with a few links to projects I was working on in School. After graduation and beginning my career, my personal portfolio grew and thus newer tech was needed. So, it was re-built using the LAMP stack  and hosted on a paid provider iPowerWeb. At one point, I had two versions running: a HTML based, using LAMP; as well as a full Flash version. As my career progressed more into the .NET space, and away from Flash, the flash version was jettisoned. Also, due to work being focused more on back-end projects, a lot of my "portfolio" pieces became obsolete and dated since I was no longer focused on the aesthetics. So, the site started to become smaller and more focused. 

In 2013, I moved to the site to Digital Ocean to take advantage of Virtual Machine offerings. By moving to DO, I was able to have much more control over the server configuration and set up which  allowed me to host a few other sites on the same instance. The last redesign of my site was launched in 2015 using the Hugo static site generator. Hugo provides simple tooling around Markdown to create and manage content separate from the layout of the site. This allowed me to move away from a PHP/MySQL set up, to a more simplistic and secure model. The content and layout are combined at build time, so the live site is just plain HTML/CSS/JS. No server side needed. I also set up a custom git hook on my production server to allow for building the site from a git commit. So, management was much, much easier.

Over the past few years we have seen a rise on the "headless" CMS, or Content as a service (CaaS). Wanting to get in on this, I decided another redesign and re-tooling was in order for late 2019.  This current version of site is built using GatsbyJS, which is React-based static site generator. Gatsby provides a slick API for building static sites using both ReactJS and GraphQL to allow for multiple types of data sources to be used for building a static site. Instead of using Markdown that I would need to edit locally and commit to a git repo to kick off a build, I decided to used the Kentico Kontent platform for managing my content. Kentico is a big player in the traditional CMS market and provides easy to use tools for managing content. With their cloud-based Kontent, those tools become even better and simpler to use. Plus, the pricing is just right. The power of Gatsby and Kentico provides a really strong developer experience and makes it really simple to build a static web site. And to take it just a bit further, I have moved this site to Netlify, which provides ridiculously fast hosting as well a simple continuous deployment workflow for keeping the site up to date. Not only is the site configured to build and launch automatically from a git commit (using Bitbucket as the git provider), it also takes advantage of web hook capabilities to allow re-building from Kentico Kontent anytime new content is published.