Let’s talk about this website

I received some questions from friends asking “Where did the idea for the website come from?” and “What is your objective with this website?”.

The idea of having a website portfolio isn’t new. Not long after starting to work in Luxembourg, I had ideas of creating a portfolio website, but it did not go beyond the idea to action. The years passed, but the idea always stayed there, in the back of my mind.

Last year, after changing works, I finally got the motivation to concretize the idea, giving it a form (at least digital).

The first step was to decide, how will I build the portfolio. There were several options. At the time, I was undecided between WordPress or as a C# developer, .NET. On one side, I had some experience in configuring and creating pages on WordPress, but I had no knowledge in terms of WordPress development, so I would be more limited in terms of modifications/personalization. The other option was more captivating to me. .Net was my daily work and I would be able to personalize easier than WordPress. And it ended up being my choice.

After choosing the technology, I needed to think about how I would do it. Since .NET 5 was the latest .NET version and I had not worked with it yet, it was a good option and a good way to try it. I choose .NET 5 MVC for the project, as I like the MVC pattern. I made another decision on this point: the portfolio would be open-source. I wanted to share with others, the same way that others share with me.

Design! That was more difficult. I am not a designer, nether is one of my best skills, so to create an appealing portfolio, I searched online for free HTML templates. After some search and consultation with my wife (who has a much better design taste than me), I found one template that I liked. The template was called “Digital Trend”, created by TemplateMo. Of course, the portfolio looks very different from the original, with several modifications and additions, but served as a good design base. One person that provided me with some advice to improve the design, was my company's Career Manager, Avy, as it is one of his specialties.

Great, I had my portfolio. Urray!!! I had something to show to the world. It was great. I was finished… or was it? Do you know how developers are, right?? 😄 I had already some ideas of features to be implemented that would improve the website 👨🏻‍💻. You probably guessed one: implementation of a blog section.

Going back to the planning board. How could I do it? Develop from scratch? Using one of the several prebuilt CMS? I did some google searches and I liked one open-source CMS, created on .NET Core. It has caught my attention. It is a framework called PiranhaCMS and was on .NET Core 5, the same as my website. Fantastic, I had my choice.

I consulted their documentation, which wasn`t very extensive because the framework is simple. Played a little bit with the official example, and I was ready to implement it on my website. I had an instance of SQL Server 2019 ready, and I saw on their documentation, that I could use the framework as a Headless CMS, so I tested and it worked as intended. I use the back office page (they called it “Manager”), to create the content and upload the images, and then in the code, I use their service to get the content. Pretty simple and this way, I had all the flexibility I wanted.

So, to conclude, I have answered the first question, but not the second: “What is your objective with this website?”. I answered one part of it but not all. The intention of the blog section is to share some thoughts or some knowledge. For everyone that finds it useful, and mainly for me. It will be my learning repository, where I can find information when I need it.

I have a portfolio page and a blog. Is it all? Of course not, but that is a subject for another blog post... Äddi.