I wanted to get a new website and found the generous offer of Vercel to host a project for free. Of course, I am a big fan of automation and putting all my stuff on GitHub is a normal approach for me. Linking a GitHub Repo and automatically deploying it to Vercel is a perfect approach for me (especially as I fell in love with the Heroku approach back in the days when Heroku was usable for “cheap” people. ;-) )

I used the template for a simple website that was offered on the vercel website and started from there.

After spending lots of time understanding all the dependencies and cleaning up the version of that template that I have cloned into my own repo, I have made the first deployment and was impressed.

I recognized that I had to practice my coding skills a little. It has been a long time ago that I have followed the Udemy course by Maximilian Schwarzmüller regarding react.

You definitely want to have at least some coding skills to run a website on that stack.

After the basic setup and deployment was working, I wanted to optimize some stuff. To reduce the chances of making ugly coding mistakes, I have extended ESLint to optimize my code and give me some hints. Furthermore, I have added husky to check that my project successfully builds to avoid being informed about mistakes that block the deployment late in the process by vercel.

And then I went down the tailwind css rabbit hole. Once I understood the basics, I cleaned most of the design and even implemented a “dark mode”.

And I have implemented a blog so that I can publish content and have a log of the stuff that I have done.

In the future I want to publish some content regarding further progress with the website, stuff that I am working on during my working hours, traveling and maybe some articles regarding home automation and other stuff that I am interested in.

Stay tuned.