5 Years of Fantinel.dev!

On this day, 5 years ago, I launched my blog alongside its first post! Back then, I had little idea if I was gonna keep writing or maintaining it. Well... turns out I did!

The First Days

This blog actually began as a Ghost blog, using its default theme. Ghost was great as a starting point as it provided a quick way to get up and running, and most importantly, a quick way to start writing. Back then I had a couple ideas for blog posts related to stuff I was doing at work - I believe they were the two posts about PWAs (How to transform your Angular app into a PWA and What are PWAs). So, back then, to me, it was more important to get started with writing than to have the perfect blog setup.

Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot of what it looked like back then, but since it used the default Ghost theme (Casper), I guess it doesn't matter much.

Five months later (October, 2019), I released the first version of this blog built by my own hands. It was built with Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator that I chose because it was fully supported by GitHub Pages (GitHub's own static website hosting service - it's free!). All posts were stored in Markdown files (that's still true to this day!), and building it was quite fun!

I didn't have the skills or courage to design something from scratch yet, so I opted to almost completely clone Ghost's default theme. Here's what it looked like:

Although I think it's definitely evolved since then, it still has its charm. The big hero with my name had a typing effect that thankfully you can still check out thanks to the Wayback Machine.

Even back then, I had some main goals for the website, that I had written on the project's README:

It was built with a few goals in mind:

• Responsive design: the website looks and behaves well on screens of all sizes;

• Fast: it only loads what's needed for it to work. No external JS or CSS libraries:

• Adaptive: it supports dark mode from most operating systems by default (desktop and mobile);

• Pretty: use a simple and organized layout with simple animations to provide a pleasant experience to all visitors.

That's still what I strive for nowadays with the website, so I'm glad 2019 me set the path to where it is right now 😊.

Version 2.0

For Version 2.0, I decided to do a big redesign of the website, and add a bit more of me into it, instead of it being a carbon copy of a theme. It's the first time I added the "waves" effect on the homepage, and since I wanted to design everything myself BUT don't have much design skills, I relied heavily on cards to organize content (I still rely on cards often). Unfortunately, there's no (working) snapshot of this version of the website on the Wayback Machine, so unless I run it locally (I'm too lazy to do it), all we have is this screenshot:

Overall, I think this is my least favorite version of it. I really like the waves effect (I still have it today), but I feel like the content didn't have enough weight. Still, it set the precedent for what the website would look like today, with the colors and overall layout.

Version 3.0

This was a big rewrite, and brought it really close to what it's like today. It was a complete rebuild from the ground up, now using Svelte and SvelteKit, replacing Jekyll. I wrote about how I built it, and it became my most read post of all time!

If you open it on the Wayback Machine and compare to the current site, it mostly looks the same. I still think the layout is not perfect, but I haven't found a better way of displaying information about me yet.

I guess the main difference is that I lost the glasses.

Version 4.0 (current)

On February, 2023, I released the current version of the website, aptly named v4. Visually, it really wasn't much of a change, but it included big changes under the hood, with me adopting atomic design for components, TypeScript, and some interactive stuff like the theme toggle. There were still some visual tweaks, like better positioning of some elements in the home page, but nothing major.

Looking back at it all

On my first ever post, I wrote that the purpose of this blog was to help myself learn about the topics I write here. And it certainly helped with that. A lot of posts here feel like guides because they are - initially a guide to myself that I decided to publish for everyone. And I'm glad I did! I don't have the numbers since the beginning, but at least since January 2021, this site was visited by 43.4k people! 🤯 That's a lot. I never expected so many people to drop in and read something I wrote. And considering most of the visitors got here from Google and into one of the guide/help articles, I hope I helped them somehow. Blog posts have been a huge source of help to me over the past years, and I'm happy to be giving back to the dev community.

(by the way, all my blog's analytics data is fully anonymized and public. You can check it out on Plausible)

But most of all, this website has been by itself a source of learning for me. More than writing, I think I learned more from building and experimenting on it, and I really don't plan on stopping. It's my testing grounds, a way to reflect a bit of who I am, and most of all, have fun.

Next steps

On the dev side, I want to keep experimenting. I have some small redesigns planned that I just need time to work on. More importantly, I'm trying really hard to simplify the writing process so I can write more, and more often, from anywhere.

And on the writing side, I really wanna expand the topics I write about. The “blogging renaissance” that's been going on lately has really inspired me to have this blog be less of a content repository and more of... Matt's blog. Last year I already started with some purely personal posts and I'm thinking of doubling down on that. But, that's only good if it comes naturally, I won't force myself to write stuff I don't want to. We'll see.

The only thing I'm certain of is that I want to keep it going.