Ben Jenkins

Welcome!

Welcome to the first post of my new portfolio site! I've just got a couple points today with more to come soon!

Why the new site?

Over three years ago I created my first portfolio site using Gatsby and a few othet dependencies. After it's creation I left that site untouched until about a year ago when I took it down and put a "Coming Soon" page in it's placed, mostly because I was not happy with it but couldn't work up the will to start refactoring the years old site into something that I would enjoy working on.

This site by comparison is pretty bare bones but has plenty of room to iterate on while also including some features that I felt like were must have.

Must haves

I hope to expand on all of these in the near futures but here are some of my must haves in getting this site up and running:

First, I needed to be able to get the minimal site I would be happy with doen quickly. I'll have plenty of time to continue adding to this but I knew that if my first pass at the site were too ambitious I would probably lose focus and never finish it. Because of this and the fact that I am not a designer the look is minimalist but I actually am kind of digging it. Next JS and Tailwind are making it super easy to get a decent foundation going for this site.

Second, I use dark mode almost all the time and have never actually had a chance to implement it so I knew I wanted to add that in my initial batch of features. I don't mean to brag about my initial dark mode implementation, it does have a few different shades of black and white but it's not especially interesting, but I knew that I wanted to choose a stack that would make the initial implementation simple.

Third, I needed some sort of analytics from the get go. I couldn't tell you how many people viewed my last site, or if anyone ever did. I knew that if I were going to invest any time into this site I would need some kind of data to evaluate and gauge what level of investment I would continue putting in to it. I'm not looking to gain much from the analytics at this point, mostly just general visitor numbers and potentially trying to match some views to new personal connections or job applications, things like that.

What's next?

I hope to continue adding more posts in the near future as I solidify some of the initial features of this site and will probably go into all of the above in more detail. I also hope to either build in or link to some small side project and share some general lessons learned from my day to day work as a software engineer. More to come soon...