Roymond.NET
When designing this website, I initially was looking for a platform to document my personal projects. However as I’ve worked on the initial version, I started to expand the scope.
In future versions of this website, my goal is to have this become the place where I document my hobbies, as well as my projects. I feel that over time this will demonstrate my growth as a person as I engage with my hobbies, my projects, and my life.
Given this new expanded scope, it’s led me to start thinking about what functionality I needed to achieve my goals. Ultimately asking the following questions
- How am I going to store the data?
- How would I present the data?
- What makes this different from a simple blog?
How am I going to store the data? Currently the data for this project is stored in an instance of Supabase. I made this decision because I wanted to have the data for the website stored on a different server from the one currently hosting my projects.
Other services I had considered were Firebase, as well as hosting my own Postgres database. I decided to go with Supabase since it is the one I’ve used the most recently (specifically with the Achievement Tracker and Ling Hotel projects) and it allowed me to keep the data separate from the deployment.
How would I present the data? This was a unique question that I had to ask myself. Since my projects aren’t always websites and aren’t always hosted by me, I wanted to figure out a simple way to display a video as well as an image. I also wanted to conditionally render whether or not the project had a website, a public repository and tags associated with it.
I suspect that over the coming months this will be the area that changes the most as I’m not entirely happy with it. Especially with how YouTube videos are getting presented to someone on a mobile device.
What makes this different from a simple blog?
I feel that this website will eventually have an instance of a blog. Especially if I achieve the goal of documenting my hobbies. In 2025, I really want to dive into video editing, music recording, as well as drawing. All of these outlets will include different requirements than my projects and the appeal of a blog here means that I can document my growth in these hobbies.
But for the projects, as well as my resume, I wanted a bit more of a defined approach. I want the project descriptions to read more like a retrospective or an overview so that the reader understands what I was trying to achieve, the technologies used and some higher level discussions to some questions I had.
What's next I believe that the next steps for this website would be to populate the data for the other projects. This will take a little bit of time because I will need to figure out my voice and the style in which these overviews/presentations should take. After that, I believe that there should be a blog, I am currently investigating the possibility of using Ghost Blog or something like that and then creating a custom presentation for the posts.