Redoing my website in 2026

I originally created my website in July 2021, at which point we were deep into the pandemic. I had decided I wanted to start streaming more so I created a website for myself, and I did it on stream. 5 years later, I decided it's time for a redesign.

My first coding stream

My first coding stream was to build my website. I still remember it. I see that the lovely Twitch Tracker has a record of it here, and it was on August 16, 2021. At this time I had streamed in the Science & Technology category not realizing there was a Software & Game Development category. Somebody told me there was a better category for that so I switched after that stream.

v1 of techygrrrl.stream

The website was built using Next.js (with the pages router) and SASS. Those technologies make it feel like forever ago!

At the time, I felt SASS was great. I loved custom SASS mixins. It was much better than other CSS approaches I had tried (like CSS-in-JS or other React-based CSS). It made a lot of sense at the time.

Since v1 was done, I had worked on various other things, including a colour scheme I used for pretty much everything called CMYK. I made colour schemes for all my editors, and also used it in apps I've built. This project became a big help for v2.

v2 of techygrrrl.stream

Fast-forward to today. I decided to use Tailwind for CSS instead of bespoke artisanal SASS.

For the static site generation, I thought I'd try eleventy, which is a static-site generator I heard about a couple of years ago. I had never tried it, and to be honest, I wasn't sure if I'd like it.

The general layout and design is fairly similar, I just changed a few things. Given that most of the heavy lifting was already done (the general layout, the colour scheme, etc.), and thanks to modern technology, it took less than a day to do the new version. I already had a layout I was happy with, I already had a general idea for content I wanted, I already had a hosting provider I was happy with (Netlify), and I had a colour scheme I already like using for all the apps I build, so I didn't need to make those decisions again.

All of this prior work allowed me to quickly whip up a new version of the website. Unlike the first version, this one supports both light and dark modes. Below are screenshots for both dark and light modes.

Evaluating the technologies I chose

In general I was happy with the technologies I chose:

• Tailwind CSS -> This one is easy. I'd previously used it many times and have really liked that it took away decisions that needed to be made. Initially I didn't like how verbose the HTML was, and how the styles were mixed in with the content in the HTML, but I got over that as I came to appreciate it making decisions for me.

• Netlify -> This one is easy. It was a great JAM stack web host when I chose it and it still is today. Very easy to set up a project and point a domain to it, and a very generous free plan.

• Eleventy -> This one is new. It's a static-site generator I didn't think I'd like. To be honest, I don't absolutely love any static-site generators but this one seemed easy to reason with because it was using NPM which I need to use for Tailwind. Other static-site generators I've used in the past that were not Node.js-based (like Hugo and Jekyll) use a different build system, e.g. Go lang for Hugo and Ruby for Jekyll, and I didn't want to use both NPM and another build system. I don't love how a lot of stuff ends up going in the .eleventy.js config file, I can see that getting pretty unruly in larger projects, but it was fine for this tiny website.

Overall I was happy with the technology decisions I made and am happy that it turned out the way it did.

You can visit it at https://techygrrrl.stream and see for yourself.