Or rather: Site plans.
My plans for this site aren’t very grand. They are very intentional, though. You see, I wrote this site in Haskell using Hakyll.
It wasn’t always, though. I spent a good few hours with TypeScript and Gatsby before ultimately deciding that was too much magic and extra bloat for what I wanted.
At the moment, it’s little more than the default template with syntax-highlighting fixed, but I have plans. Those plans mirror a saying I came up with and have repeated over the years:
Make it work. Make it fast. Make it pretty.
And, for optional, extra emphasis:
In that order.
What I mean is that we often spend too much time concerned with how pretty an app is, prioritizing form over function. Not only does a customer not care that a site is pretty if it turns out not to work, but I’ve found that it’s far to easy to lose countless hours adjusting the appearance of something. So much so that once you’re finally happy to move on to implementing functionality, you’re short on time and have to cut corners.
As for speed, things only need to be preceptively fast enough. That is, if the user doesn’t notice that you made a process take microseconds instead of milliseconds, then the optimization didn’t truly matter. So really, when I say “make it fast”, what I’m really saying is “make it fast enough”. The reason this step doesn’t come after make it pretty is because often, shiny UIs need to feel snappy, so you have to pay attention to speed so that you don’t end up with a beauty that tags ages to load.
So, for this site, I want to do the same thing.
Make it work
This is actually a bit of a double entendre. Not only do I mean that I have a set of features that I would like to implement, but that I’d like to use the evolution of this website as a portfolio piece to send along with my job applications going forward. As I implement features, I’ll write short posts explaining the changes I’ve made along with screenshots.
At the moment, the main pages I have planned are: - The blog, which you’re reading now - A portfolio that lists any projects I want to highlight - An online version of my resume
Make it fast
As a static website, it’s already going to be plenty fast. So in this case, I’m bending the definition of “make it fast” to mean “get everything up and running quickly”. The more content I can create for this blog, the more I’ll have to show employers, and the more samples I’ll have to draw from as I think about how best to style this site.
Make it pretty
In addition to moving away from the default theme to something more me, I’d like to go over my resume again and see what can be cleaned up, since I styled it ages ago. I’ll also be looking to see if I can add more interactivity to some plages, like my portfolio, and perhaps add some interactive Easter eggs to the site if I’m feeling up to it.
On Iterating
One thing that’s probably worth pointing out that nothing about my motto precludes iterating or moving quickly. That is, “make it work” doesn’t imply that the entire project needs to be complete before you can move on to “make it work” or “make it pretty”. Instead, you consider whatever unit of work makes sense.
If you’re working on a feature and are blocked by some dependency that another team is working on, that’s a good time to move on to the other steps. If you just finished a bit of functionality, whether that’s finishing an endpoint or wiring up a view, that’s a perfect time to finish the other steps!
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All of that being said, I think it’s time to finish adding those missing pages.