About My Garden 🌱

Welcome to my Digital Garden. This is an extension of my portfolio. The idea of a digital garden came after realising that I had no place to store useful information.

I wanted a website where I could;

  • Write my thoughts or discoveries that are related to my coding journey.
  • Save useful links/bookmarks that I (or someone else) might require at a later time
  • Save useful tools I've come across in case I ever forget them
  • Write documentation about the projects I've worked on.

My first step was opening issue #122 on my portfolio's repo as I began researching on how I would make it possible.

My aim was to worry less about the look of the site but more about the content. I first came across Storybook. I had no idea what it was used for, I later came to learn it's used mostly to develop design systems and building components in an isolated environment, which is far from what I'm trying to achieve.

After searching I came across Nextra and docz. They are both static site generators that use MDX for the content which is a plus. The difference between the two is that Nextra is powered by Next.js while docz is powered by Gatsby. Docz having been around longer has the advantage of being well known with more users and more features as well. I however chose Nextra because I had been building with Next.js for a while and wasn't willing to let it go just yet in addition to Nextra's simple look and easiness to setup.

A few weeks of using Nextra and I was beginning to see some downsides. One of them being that it was difficult to add my own styles since I was using a predefined theme and changing styles would mean that I'd have to fork, edit and publish the theme library which is quite a lot of work. Another downside was that I wasn't able to create dynamic pages since page files were in Markdown.

I eventually decided to do away with Nextra and redesign the whole garden from scratch (with Next.js and TailWindCSS ofcourse 😉) so as to have more control on how my garden looks.

Feel free to have a look around. Hope it inspires you to make something of your own 😊

You can find me on LinkedIn if you'd like to connect :)