Creating a Homepage in 2025
This is part 1 of creating a homepage in 2025. This will probably become a series so buckle up.
The beginning of 2025 was very rough for me and my family. I got laid off, and days after that, one of my eldest cats died a week before my birthday.. When I got myself together, I started looking for a new job, I went into the job market again (sarcastic yay!). Fortunately, I had a lot of interviews and, unfortunately, many people asked for my website and my portfolio, which I did not have prepared, so I lost a couple of good opportunities. I have to be honest: I have been neglecting that task since I got my first job as a Frontend developer.
I actually had a homepage and a portfolio showcase, but I built it when I started studying frontend and it's hosted on GitHub pages. Well, technically... I got a template and customized the code. At that time I didn't have the experience or the eye to create a good design from scratch, and a template seemed like a good place to start. The site has a couple of fun facts about myself but completely unrelated to my work, like a counter of how many hours I wasted on Destiny (1 and 2) and how many countries I visited. Still, it was good for a junior dev... or so I thought.
Definitely not good enough for a senior frontend developer. But I haven't been idle all this time, most of my work has been contributing to private repositories (which I cannot share with anyone for obvious reasons), working on personal side projects, and building cat trees for my 7 cats. As I mentioned in another post, I like to write a lot, but most of my notes are hidden inside my laptop and notebooks, which I recycled recently (facepalm). So, I decided to start working on a personal site.
First, I acquired the insuasti.com domain. Since I started living here in Medellin, my last name has become my brand, mostly because everyone calls me Insua instead of Juan, which I really like. Buying the domain was the first commitment to myself that I was going to see this project through.
Then, it was time to decide on the tech stack. In the previous years, I worked with Remix, so I wanted to go back to NextJs and see what was new. TLDR: Everything changed, which was exciting. I had a great opportunity to learn about server components and get an update on React (even though many companies would not be using it just yet—it is impressive how many still require developers to know about class components; legacy code is a huge thing).
There are also other libraries I wanted to use like Tailwind CSS, Radix UI (I ended up using ShadcnUI, which is built upon Radix), and even three.js. This site can be a great playground for experimentation.
As soon as I had the MVP ready (which was a navbar, a hero, and the About Me section), I got a job, and I got distracted with the onboarding, catching up to the team, and getting used to working in a different timezone. However, this time I wasn't going to let my homepage die. I gave myself a couple of months of adjusting, and then I had to make some time to work on this. And here I am.
Since I have to juggle between my job and this side project, I think it's a good opportunity to use AI. I have been adamant against the use of AI while learning, but I will give in to the AI hype and start using copilot (I have been paying for it for a year—it is the best autocomplete I've used in my life, and it has also made working with TypeScript less painful). So far, I've had mixed results, sometimes exceeding my expectations and in some cases being painfully frustrating. But this is a topic for another post.
So far I've built quite a lot, but there is still a lot of things to do. I will try to post updates more frequently and maybe start writing more technical posts. Until then, (as my niece would say) live long and prosper.