JAM's Blog

It's now 2019 and I've decided to start a blog. I couldn't think of a name for my blog, so I decided to just use the initials from my full name. I'm a junior web developer working with .NET at my current job and I decided to do this blog because I want to become a better web developer. This past year (2018) I came across a few blog posts and tweets that encouraged one to document their journey of learning new things in web development by either writing blog posts or streaming. That encouragment led me to think that I should set a goal for the new year of documenting what I build and learn. My current goal for 2019 is to learn React. What better way to start learning React than with a blog that I've started from scratch with a barebones Gatsby Starter Hello World Template. I will build and learn as I go with this blog. Just last night I pushed this blog live with Netlify with just "Hello world!" on the page.

And today I wrote my first blog post. Right now the site looks crappy, but as the year goes on I will make it look much nicer than it is now. In trying to make it look nicer I'll be learning better ways to do things, which in turn will make me a better web developer.

January 1, 2019

Let's see, its been a little over three months since I've started this blog and I've been really lazy in trying to keep up with it, and I got to say it's hard. I stare at a computer screen and look at code all day at work, so by the time I get home from work I'm burnt out. Either way, I still have to continue to better my habits and time management, I've squandered way too many weekends by doing absolutely nothing, but here I am writing a post on Sunday. Here's what I've done recently with the blog. I've gone through the Gatsby Tutorial once already, but I'm going through it again as I build this blog. So far, I've finshed part 4 and I'm now getting into the advanced data part of the tutorial. I've added some basic CSS styles and the typography.js library to make the blog look decent, and I added a GraphQL query for the title of the blog. I got to say it has been good practice going through the tutorial again, its been helping me practice Git and in learning a little bit of React. Here's how the blog posts look like in localhost right before I push it live.
By the next blog post I'll have finished the part of the tutorial where the posts are converted to markdown.

March 17, 2019