The Adventure Of Creating My Personal Website

May 29, 2025

This is my third attemp at creating my personal repository. And third time lucky as the saying goes. I've been curious about web development for years now and have been working on an off on different versions of a personal website in the last few years. Given that I wanted to use this project to start my web development journey, I didn't go for the straightforward path of using services that do all the technical heavy-lifting for you. I decided to start from scratch, using pure HTML, CSS and sprinkles of JavaScript, inspired by this fantastic Udemy course.

Prologue

Website made with R

My First Personal Website: No Frameworks

In that first attempt I reached a layout I was happy with, you can see it here: https://datavid.netlify.app/. I focused a lot

  • CSS Design System
  • Maps
  • PJ5
  • Dark Mode (?)
  • Netlify
  • Github repo
  • The issues

Second Attempt: React via Gatsby

https://davidpardobernal.netlify.app/

  • Transfer the old sections to the new system
  • Components
  • Feeling of lack of community
  • Article about leaving Gatsby behind, despite liking the Jamstack

And Finally publishing

  • Why Vercel and Next
  • Why the new approach
  • Focus on shipping/going public (quote the R guy (David)?)

Conclusion

Going forward