I built this website

I built this site. Let me tell you about it.

The Motivation

My motivations to build this website are two fold:

1. I wanted to have a place to show people some of the things I've built.

2. I wanted to build a functional example of a static website populated with content from a headless CMS.

Technologies

This static site was built with Gatsby and Contentful.

I write these posts in Contentful and I use Gatsby to present the content with React components. I use Jest to test my React components. I chose Gatsby because I had already tinkered a bit with Next.js and I wanted to try my hand at another React framework for this project. I chose Contentful because there is already a nice Gatsby plugin that pulls Contentful data into a Gatsby project, and Contentful offers a free plan.

Deployments & Hosting

I write code with VS Code. When I am ready to commit my changes, I push the updated code to Github where Github Actions execute my tests, build the static website using the gatsby-source-contentful plugin, and uploads the build artifacts to AWS S3. I use Amazon Route 53 to point my domain to an AWS CloudFront distribution which delivers this website to your browser which your eyeballs or screen reader are now reading. If you want to know more, the website code is available here: https://github.com/hatertron3000/patrickbuildscoolstuff-gatsby-site.