I have been in the state of constant tear down and rebuild of a personal website for me. For the last 12 months I have been in the state of constantly learning something new and exciting and wanting to rebuild all the things.
I needed to get something built and went with what I know.
Gatsby was always going to be my platform. I started with Gatsby through Level Up Tutorials, Scott Tolinski's tutorials are awesome and he has a great way of explaining the technology. Being based on React made this an easy choice as well.
Emotion as the platform to handle styling came through a conversation with Mitchell Hamilton at a SydJS meetup. I had worked with styled components and really enjoyed how it was written so jumping to Emotion especially with their styled components style API did make it easier, I really want to look into and use Emotion more.
Contentful is being used to hold the blog posts, It was one of the choices for the Gatsby tutorial I did when I first started and I really like how Contentful interacts with Gatsby.
React Spring is an awesome library that is super easy to use, I found that it just added the little animations that really made a difference to the website.
Hosting on Zeit Now was a little bit forced If I am honest. I originally wanted to host on Netlify due to its auto builds and web-hooks for Contentful which makes hosting super easy. I bought the domain name tomwritesco.de through Zeit's new domain service and they don't have the ability to change their name server yet.
Having said this, Now was very easy to get setup, their documentation is awesome. The only thing I had to get setup in the project was a now.json file which tells Now how to handle the files for build.