The first After-School Project
Published: 2021-01-07 04:44:17

Finishing OSD600 was a major milestone in my development as a programmer and as a software maintainer. I genuinely cannot express how happy taking that class has made me and how ready I feel to take on the next big project.

##But first...

I want to make something simple. I took a break from coding for about a week after my class ended (and thus my stint at Seneca College in general), and decided to enjoy the holidays with the many hours I was given at my part-time job and my girlfriend, with whom I spent lots of time cooking food with on Christmas Day.

But back to the project. I want it to be simple and brush me back up on coding for the front-end. Though the projects I was working on in OSD600 were fun and great, I loved creating [link checker](https://github.com/fluentinstroll/Link-Checker) and [releasing it](https://dev.to/fluentinstroll/creating-the-first-release-and-link-checker-1-0-30o3) as well as [working on other Javascript-heavy projects](https://dev.to/fluentinstroll/release-0-4-and-the-end-4d75), I do feel like my back-end skills have been worked hard for now and though I will return to that, I want to learn more about webpage design and front-end frameworks like React and Vue (having worked largely with Angular the last year).

However, this first project won't be in either of those - it will be with Jekyll.

![githubPagesScreenshot](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/pp89cgbfyupgdjq12ow7.png)

Yes, that's right, I building a personal website for myself. The project every software developer ruins into at least once. Allow me to outline what I want to build and what I would like to learn:

##I would like to learn how to design appealing-looking web pages

The biggest thing for me is that as a software developer, I don't have a terribly great eye for beauty. That doesn't mean I don't understand the basics of how to make something pleasing to look at, it just means that I don't the skill required to design something that's more complicated than, say, a simple blog or table of information. I also am not that confident in my CSS knowledge and I'd like to fix that.

##I would like to learn Jekyll

I was originally going to build my website in vanilla Javascript, but I think now that was foolish and instead I'd like to learn a static site generator that will work for simple webpages because even though I love Javascript, I don't want to work for a simple website.

##I would like to learn about GitHub Pages

Frankly, I think being able to host my projects straight from GitHub would be such a great option since all my code is going to be there anyway. I know locking yourself into an ecosystem is kind of a bad idea but I don't see anyone raising alarms about it so I'm not too perturbed.

#Let's start

First, I created my [GitHub pages](https://pages.github.com/) repository and connected it to a local git repo, then I started getting into Jekyll. I recommend [this blog post](https://www.vgemba.net/blog/Setup-Jekyll-WSL/) if, like me, you've gotten used to using WSL in vscode for your web development work.

## Jekyll

Getting started with Jekyll is pretty easy. [GitHub Pages](https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/working-with-github-pages/creating-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll) even has a section on initializing the Jekyll site with Pages.

![JekyllBlog_1](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/v9e9m1grvdlhvsnhv4ao.png)

Not that I have a templated site on my Pages domain, I'd like to make this blog, my dev.to blog, display on my site.

A great GitHub repo for this is [equalcoding.github.io](https://github.com/equalcoding/equalcoding.github.io), with this template I managed to build a website in about 30 minutes that would display all my dev.to blogs and my GitHub repos.

![JekyllBlog_2](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/fyxkpbnnouxemodmq826.png) 

## Next

The next things I would like to do are change up the look of the site and maybe add repos that I've recently contributed to? Or are in general involved with.

Though I didn't particularly learn a ton about Jekyll, since the site I cloned used a lot of vanilla Javascript and HTML, I think themes are very important and I can't wait to explore them more.

If you;d like to take a look at my site, you can see it [here](https://fluentinstroll.github.io/).

Until next time!