Why I migrated my personal site to Next.js

In 2015, while I was a student in Australia I created a simple personal website to support job search. This basic website included a brief bio, contact information, and resume. I built it using SCSS and static HTML hosted on github pages. The website served its purpose and required basically zero maintenance but it never proved to be that useful to me. In fact, I think the only contact I ever received from it was an old coworker alerting me to a typo. ;)

Fast forward six years and my goals for this site have changed. Rather than being a tool in my job search I wanted to create personal site that can be a platform for me to write and to showcase my work. I also wanted the ability to expand the scope of it in the future, for example to highlight advisory opportunities, mentorship opportunities or something else.

I started learning about Nextjs a few months back while working on Kojito and it seemed like it would be a great fit for a personal site with the capabilities I want and would provide room to grow if I wanted it. I also figured that working on another nextjs project would help me further my skills and learn more about the framework and technology. I quickly came across this Tailwind Nextjs Starter Blog, which was a perfect fit for my needs. Part of the reason Nextjs is so great is the awesome and vibrant community around it.

Getting the new site set up and configured to my liking for this took only a couple of hours and I've quickly been able to use it to get started writing and publishing.