002 - Forced Myself to Launch My Site For A /uses Page (CCwF 2021)

Hello again! And welcome back to the "Coding Challenges with Friends" series. If you're interested in the said series, you may want to check out the first two posts (Part 0, Part 1). Enjoy!

There are no code snippets in this post, so if you just want to look at the output, you may simply scroll past the following wall of text and click the links below.

The second challenge was inspired by Wes Bos' uses.tech, which in a sense is an extension of his /uses page. Compared to the last challenge, this one is objectively easier since it's technically just a page with a bunch of lists. But for a lazy-ass person like me, the most difficult part of doing a /uses page is that part that comes before the /.

I could've easily just created a blank webapp with a /uses page, get a random domain name from vercel, and call it a day. But I wanted to finish the challenge properly. And in keeping with the CCwF tradition, I had to do something I've never done before, so here's a list things that I've done for the first time:

1. Use Next.js - React is my comfort place, and for these challenges, I really wanted to stay away from it to force myself to learn new things. But the combination of SSR, fantastic routing and history management, and no-hassle deployment to Vercel was hard to say no to. And since I haven't used Next.js before, I decided to give myself a free React-pass this time around.

2. Use Framer Motion - I've been seeing this library for quite a while now but never had the chance to use it until now. Thanks to its AnimatedSharedLayout, I was able to make page-to-page layout transitions without re-rendering (and therefore resetting) my animated background.

3. Launch my personal site. That's right. In my 12 years as a professional Web Developer & Designer, I've never, not once, launched a personal site. It's the usual cycle of starting the said project based on a general idea, then trying to implement the best tech approach available, then procrastinating, and then going back to the project after a few months only to realize that the codebase already looks dated. But not today.

For someone my age and in an agency role that's more managerial than creative, I can easily not care about these things anymore and expect to have a relatively stable life. But I'm glad that I have friends who challenge me to do new things and to never stop growing. And speaking of these friends, they also finished the challenge! So if you're interested in our sites or the things that we use on a daily basis, try visiting the links below.

Mine - cerbito.com
Ellice's - acayan.xyz
Joimee's - cajandab.vercel.app

You may also want to check out other people's setups over at uses.tech. And while you're at it, why not join the challenge and make yours as well? Cheers!