It's been a while since I've looked at the old portfolio site! I've been happily plugging away at my day job for the past four years, a job that this site likely helped me to secure. While I'm still perfectly happy with where I'm at, I've been feeling the urge to update this old thing, if only to re-aquaint myself with react and nextjs.
Plus, I'd like to finally create some new blog posts! It feels like every week I run into something that makes me stop and think "I should do a write-up on this." The list is a mile long at this point, and I've finally decided I want to start checking things off.
I've had to do a lot of housekeeping to get this site back in working order. I built it on version 9 of NextJS, and we're up to 14! After some serious head-scratching, and a little bit of yelling at my terminal, I think I've just about gotten everything up to speed. Well, good enough to not fail a deployment at least. The packages I use for this blog were a bit of a head-scratcher, there were some breaking changes and some archived code that I had to find replacements for, but I've got that all buttoned up. Maybe I should write an addendum to my previous post on this topic! I'll add it to the list.
I also got rid of that questionably custom-coded slider in favor of react-slick, and updated some of the 'technologies' content. Ultimately I'd like to rebuild this whole thing, but these felt like some good first steps.
I've undergone a huge amount of professional growth over the past four years. I'm just coming off one of my largest projects ever, building out a pretty complex CRM integration for a client site, and am currently on the tail-end of a smaller build that turned out to be one of my cleanest ever front-ends (in my opinion). I've been dabbling with Kotlin and native android development, currently working on a very amateur recipe keeping app. While I will never kick the feeling that I have no idea what I'm doing, I feel like I'm starting to come into my own just a little a bit. I have a lot to talk about!