Re-Design & Next Steps

I seem to be updating my portfolio only when I’m about to start applying for jobs again. But anyway, I think this version looks a heap lot better…maybe!

The Changes

Quite a few changes this round. The header & footer is still largely the same, but there are a couple of extra of things you may find a little familiar if you’ve been here (like the header & footer). Let’s do a page by page breakdown and I’ll highlight some interesting bits I came across when doing this.

1. The home page

Whelp, it is seriously different. I went for a more miscellaneous geometric-shape type design. We’re still using Tailwind though.

2. The CV page

I think my former one was just a link to the PDF? This time it’s an actual page, made of code and everything. It was getting kind of annoying updating the website after updating my CV and not being able to access it while away from my personal devices. Now I just have to make sure I update the markdown file on the relevant repo and it’ll do my PDF & word doc for me decently well.

Very ugly HTML/CSS management though, client-side PDF generation from actual HTML is so hard.

3. Projects page

Still a bit of a mess to be honest! I’ll see if I have any inspiration on my next theme update haha. I decided to do away with the project pages because didn’t really have much content. I also got rid of the names and direct links to their websites because that’s probably the right thing to do even without any NDAs (…oops).

Now only some of my personal projects are linked. If you ever want to know more about the projects I did for work, feel free to contact me.

4. Now hosted on Cloudflare

I’ve moved away from Netlify and moved onto Cloudflare. It just felt a tiiiny bit faster and overall better against DDOS attacks.

As a result of it though, no Netlify forms which was a huge nicety. :/

My workaround was a stylised Google Form. No iFrame, but it comes at the cost of a not-so-good client-side validation before a jsonp-based request as an attempt to prevent invalid data. I actually never succeed in the jsonp request, but valid answers do seem to get stored if validated correctly. You’ll also get redirected to a nice thank you page now.

Let’s see how it holds up against spam…if not I’ll have to get another solution maybe.

What I’m on to next

I considered whether to implement GA4 for this portfolio website but eugh, I kind of don’t like the 5-10 page speed reduction score much. So never mind, no one will be visiting this site anyway!

I’m now currently working on a custom terminology lookup system. Essentially, it’s a bit like a custom online dictionary, glossary, thesaurus or translation termbase. It’s definitely not a terminology management system as I’ll only be focusing on the searching-for-terms part.

Tentative technologies will be: Laravel, with a key focus on Meilisearch & caching. I’m thinking Postgres for better jsonb indexing.

Oh well, that’s all I’m thinking for now. Thanks for reading!