This website has existed in one for or another for upwards of 10 years at this point. It is essentially the catalyst for my love of programming, technology, and for my choice of study at university, and my career. When I first created it I was in my early teens and it was created using solely HTML and CSS. Since then each time I learn of some new technology through uni, on my own steam, or at work, I rework the site a little bit. The current design is my favourite so far. It’s also the most complex.

I would like to note that I’m not a designer and the purpose of the site was never to look pretty but rather to be a playground in which I could experiment with ideas and technologies and where I could learn. Although I think it’s fair to say that over time the visuals have improved somewhat.

A little timeline

• 2009 - sites initial creation, very basic hand rolled static site. Contents is a bio and some downloads (probably poorly considered by my teen self) to different things I liked.

• 2010-2014 - site remains largely unchanged, it is re-created early on and has downloads removed.

• 2015 - a forum is created (now removed until further notice) and added to the site following a long forgotten tutorial on how to create a PHP based forum. Along with this, the knowledge gained from creating the forum is used to create a very basic gallery. It was open to the public for uploads and there was a global clear button. Very simple comment threads were also used.

  

  I don’t have a simple way of capturing images of the earlier sites, one of which I have totally lost, or the php sections of the site.

• 2018 - a major change occurs. The forum, site, and gallery, are all recreated in angularjs and node APIs are built for the forum and gallery. This came from a web dev topic I completed at uni. Everything looked pretty similar to the previous iteration the implementations were completely new. I hosted the node APIs on the Kubernetes cluster I talk about in another post. Their management was a pain though for reasons I won’t get into here which leads me to…

  

• 2020-2021 - the site is rewritten yet again, this time using angular11 (something I was introduced to through work). The forum and gallery are removed from the site and instead a simple blog is added. I will cover the simple blog api I have created in another post however you can find it on my gitlab. I do plan on recreating the forum and gallery at some point. However, I think I am going to fucus on this little blog for now. I want to add more content and make it a bit more feature rich if I can.

  

• 2022 - Present. I have re-created the website yet again, this time in using Hugo. I originally got the idea from Luke Smith but it’s taken me some time to complete this while working on my final year of uni and since I started Hugo has exploded in popularity. The site, including it’s posts of which there are few so far, are totally static. Thus the largest part of the site for the user to download is the font I’m using which I think is pretty cool. I indent to continue working on the site and in partuclar the content, which I’m hoping to add to semi-regularly.

• the future - I guess we will see.