I started redesigning my personal site, and thought it’d be fun to document it along the way, like I did with my freelancing app, Cushion. Rather than fall into the trap of writing serious, heavily-edited, long-form blog posts, I’ll try my best to keep these short, frequent, and to-the-point. As a rule of thumb, I should be able to write a post in less than 15 minutes.

In the spirit of posting early and often, I wanted to get this up and running from the very beginning, so I’m publishing this first post without even starting on the design—the only progress I’ve made so far is setting up the backend. I’ve been out of the loop when it comes to modern stacks, so I’m taking this opportunity to try new things. I’m experimenting with Contentful as the CMS, Nuxt.js for server-side rendering, and Now for hosting. I’m not strongly tied to any of these, so there’s a chance I might swap one out if I don’t love it—in fact, I already nixed Netlify after a cumbersome first deploy. Who knows—I might return to PHP on an FTP host if I continue to find that everything easy is hard again.

I’m also utilizing this time to try out several other tools beyond the stack that powers the site. For design, I’m giving Figma another shot after playing it safe with Sketch all these years. For prototyping, I’m using CodeSandbox—I truly want this site to jumpstart my creativity, so there might be times when I want to iterate on animations or interactions that have no real purpose besides being fun. Along with a jolt to my creativity, I’m looking to push myself technically. Rather than falling back to the same CSS or JS I’ve been writing for years, I’m eager to try new APIs using this site as my sandbox.

I already feel like I’ve written too much. Keep an eye on this space, and keep me active if I start to slack.

-Jonnie, @destroytoday