2024 Portfolio Site Update - ddmcd.dev
Date: September 29th, 2024
A Long Time Coming, But Here We Are
Over 600 days ago, I began the conversion of my personal website from Gatsby to NextJS. Today, I'm excited to announce that the NextJS version is finally complete on a new domain ddmcd.dev.
To clarify, it didn’t take two years to complete the conversion. A working version was already live on Vercel a couple of years ago, but it was far from meeting my quality standards. Due to other work committments and personal projects, I paused development, leaving the conversion in a "preview" state while the Gatsby version remained the main site.
Recently, I decided to revisit and finish the conversion for several reasons. First, Gatsby is effectively obsolete—Netlify has ceased maintaining it, and the developer community’s interest has waned significantly. Second, I expect to have a few new projects to share soon, and the site needed a refresh to support them. When I reviewed the existing code, I realized there was still substantial work to be done. While the conversion was technically complete, I wanted to overhaul the architecture by replacing the GraphQL API with the Contentful package to fetch content, mirroring the approach I use on major client projects. Maintaining GraphQL is no longer something I'm interested in.
What's New
Several key features were missing from the initial conversion. For example, some pages were client-side rendered rather than statically generated. I attribute this to the transition from Gatsby, where everything is statically generated, to NextJS, where there are more flexible rendering options.
With this latest update, I’ve addressed these issues, adding revalidation to ensure more efficient page builds, updating the mobile layout, fixing CSS bugs, and improving the user experience across the site. I'm thrilled with the outcome and look forward to sharing more projects soon.
One final update was a new domain, as the .me didn't quite have the professional sound and look of displaying various development projects. With some various new updates coming soon, it made sense to capture a .dev domain. The old Gatsby site danielmcdermott.me will begin redirecting to ddmcd.dev in the coming days.