bjcant.dev

Welcome!

October 12, 2019 • 2min read

Welcome to my new site, bjcant.dev! This will be the new home of my writings on web development, particularly in the front-end space. My old website, https://bjcantlupe.com, will remain up as an archive of posts and projects from the beginning of my career in technology. Someday it will be repurposed, but for now I like it as a friendly reminder of what it took to get where I am today.

what’s the deal with this site?

After taking a two-year “hiatus” (*cough*-lazy-*cough*), I am finally following through with a personal goal to give back to the dev community. Not only do I want to share what I have learned while working as a web developer, but I also recognize that participating in the dev community is one of the best ways to learn.

So I want to start by talking about this site. The goal was to create something with a single purpose, free of distractions — just a blog. I wanted to build it in a weekend, and that’s exactly what happened! It’s a work in progress, but as I have learned: everything is a work in progress. I will add related posts along with new features and improvements.

A few things on the TODO list:

  • Refactor CSS to utilize CSS modules
  • Refactor template file structure
  • Add light mode (I guess)
  • Update SEO stuff
  • Add a “read time” feature, a la Medium
  • Cross-post to Dev.to via RSS feed

This site was built using Gatsby.js, the insanely popular static site generator backed by React and GraphQL. It was bootstrapped using gatsby-starter-blog and styled with the tachyons-verbose CSS library. The color palette was pseudo-generated from somewhere I can’t remember. I chose to start with a dark theme because frankly, light backgrounds give me headaches. The site is hosted on Netlify, which is easily the quickest and smoothest deployment pipeline setup I have ever gone through.

what’s next?

More posts! I am challenging myself to write at least two posts a week — we’ll see how that goes. If you’d like to learn more about me and/or get in touch, I’d love to hear from you! I can be found on LinkedIn, twitter, or email