The obligatory website creation post

The original idea was that I needed a website to display my photography, and originally I made use of Gatsby and a nice theme by LekoArts. There were a few things that I didn't like about it, mostly the lack of control as I wanted to add titles to images, and make some blog posts as well. So here we are, starting from scratch.

Vibe coding

Wowzers what can I say, programming is fun again. In all honestly it would have taken me 20 times longer to do this without the use of AI, so thanks for that. Needless there was some need to have some idea of what I was doing, so I followed some tutorials on youtube. In hindsight I should have made use of the tutorials that Next provide as these probably would have been more relevant and would have saved me from getting stuck on things like static/server pages amongst other things.

As it turns out you can't vibe code everything, and actually I think it's slower than knowing how to do it yourself. In my position of being a programmer as my day job I didn't want to spend all of my free time basically doing the same thing, but I did find that AI was a good bridge in being able to create something in the way that I wanted to, but with significantly less effort. Now, with a bit more understanding, I find it as a good assist. When I don't know how to do something specific ,css :/, it is much faster than say stack overflow.

Next.js

I'm still not sure if Next was the right choice, I already had some experience with Gatsby, and I did tutorials in Vite. I did shoohorn myself into either Next or Gatsby as they have some nice hosting services, which was kinda a must. I definitely didn't want to go through the headache of having to learn how to use AWS or some other tool on top of react as well.

All in all, now that everything is set up, it's actually super nice to work with maybe just a bit more difficult on the seutp that I bargained for.

What I actually learned

Surprisingly a lot, considering how much I vibe coded in the beginning of this. I wouldn't quite say that I would be comfortable in making a website again from scratch without the help of AI, but I definitely wouldn't fall into all of the same traps that I did this time, not understanding page routing or static components. Alo I actually have some idea of how to use CSS now, which is nice.

The end goal of this was more to have a website where I can showcase my side projects and my photography rather than learn react/css/html, and that is soundly a goal acchieved. This definitely not the most direct route to get there, but we did get there and I learnt something along the way as well. I'm not sure if I will actually end up using what I learnt again, I definitely don't plan on making another website from scratch any time soon, maybe for extending it, adding a shop page or something, but aside from that I think this will be all the react for now.