I’ve been in several different types of roles over the past few years, but lately I’ve been firmly situated as a product designer. As such, it’s important that I have a formal portfolio website to showcase some of my work and make myself easy to consider for other potential jobs in the future.
After consulting with my good friend Matthias Jordan who frequently experiments with lots of web tooling, I landed on creating a site using a React-based static site framework called Gatsby, with deployment managed via Github and Netlify.
I’ve become somewhat familiar with working in React lately, thanks to some work at Aspiration helping build new buttons and other components directly in their codebase, so it’s been fun to apply those skills to a personal project.
After getting the main structure of the site set up on my Mac, I’m now able to edit the site content using a few apps on my iPad Pro. I can pull from Github using Working Copy, edit the Markdown-based project content in iA Writer, then commit and push back up to Github. Changes go live almost instantly thanks to Netlify’s auto-deploy, which means I can update or post new content from anywhere.