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why I created this website

Everything you want to know about it

The idea

After 5 intense years dedicated to the creation and growth of a start-up, I decided to take a break to reflect on my professional future. In the hope of "reinventing" myself (even if I don't particularly like this fashionable term).

For the past year, I've been doing trainings to be up to date on emerging technologies, I'm experimenting on subjects that interest me, maybe to end up one day with a start-up. At the same time, my research has brought me an ecological and social justice awareness. I would like to invest myself in one or more projects on this theme.

As it is not necessarily easy to find a fulfilling and meaningful job, I decided to create a website to "sell" myself a little better. It's also an opportunity for me to do an unnatural exercise, being a bit shy and often thinking that my opinion is not necessarily useful to strangers. And from a technical point of view, it allows me to experiment with new technologies that I don't know much about in practice (Jamstack, servless functions...)

The technical part

Creating a new website is an opportunity to experiment with technologies that I don't master completely, in order to learn. One of the pitfalls I experienced previously was to code everything yourself just "because you can", and also it must be said because turnkey solutions are often not adapted. Even if no-code solutions of an impressive quality are flourishing these last years, they are often constrained and do not allow to have the quality of a coded solution. In my previous experience, the landing page and the blog were initially fully coded. Due to the rapid demands of marketing, the blog and specific landing pages were migrated to Hubspot, the problem being that the marketing teams were not completely autonomous and still had specific requests to the technical teams on a specific platform that they themselves did not know. In short, the CMS solution was not ideal either.

For a few years, there have been solutions labeled JamStack, used to automate a number of tedious tasks (image optimization, bundling, SEO, backend construction ...) to have a professional rendering in a very short time. After having done a technology watch, I choose a rather popular stack, allowing to deploy and manage the site entirely free of charge:

  • GatsbyJS](https://www.gatsbyjs.com/) : framework for generating websites
  • Strapi](https://strapi.io/) : headless CMS (content management)
  • Netlify : deployment of the GatsbyJS site
  • Heroku : deployment of Strapi
  • Cloudinary : media management

My preference would have been to use Nuxt rather than Gatsby for the frontend, because it is based on the Vue framework, but at the time of my choices it was not yet available in version 3, compatible with Vue 3 and Vite. Moreover it offers less automation and plugins than Gatsby. In the near future, I will experiment with site generation by Nuxt.

Backend : Strapi + Heroku + Cloudinary

The backend part is managed by Strapi. Strapi is part of the so-called "Headless CMS" tools, which allow you to manage the content of the site you want to publish. For example, titles, logos, organization of sections, blog articles...

In development phase,

The use of Strapi is quite intuitive, you build

Frontend

The Frontend part is managed by Gatsby + Netlify


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Denis

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