None of the stuff I made in the early days of my web development career still exists. My first paid gig has been taken down due to it not being needed. One of the earliest projects I worked on ever got finished ( yet! ). Other sites have just been updated. I suppose that this is not uncommon in this industry which moves pretty quick.

Surge

Surge was the first hosting that I was introduced to which opened my eyes to how easy it is to deploy a static site today. So, to preserve the past and always remember where I came from here is the original joshuacrewe.co.uk. If I don’t look at the code too closely then I am pretty pleased with it even to this day. The intention behind the site was to prove to the world ( and potential employers ) that I could actually build a website. It launched with one broken link ( which, if working would take the user to a page with no content ) and no contact information.

It served its purpose though and I think that it did help me to land a job as a web developer. Job done. Fun fact - Thats not me in the photo.

Hugo

I found Hugo when looking for a platform to build nancycrewe.co.uk. I had heard Jekyll was slow and Go was fast. Thats about as much thought as I put in to it. When it came to deciding what to base this site on I then went with experience, 100% of which was in Hugo based sites ( thats both the static sites I have ever worked on ). In reality I think it is quick but I don’t really know.

Netlify

Now here is a service that I have been impressed with. Surge was serving me well and I really loved the easy deployment from the command line. The plan was always to stick with the free tier and handle SSL through Cloudflare. This made me feel uneasy for silly reasons. There is something about the service that Cloudflare provides that I don’t quite trust. The flexible SSL doesn’t cover the whole journey from browser to server and I just didn’t want to put all my domains into that service. I wholly admit this is most likely due to my ignorance but it was enough to never quite get around to making an account.

Enter Netlify and their push to sponsor every single podcast that I have listened to. They give so much out for free I genuinely don’t quite know how they make money. Their one click SSL is powered by Lets Encrypt while their continuous deployment is fab. All I have to do is git. I flipping love git. Netlify takes care of the rest.

Here it is

These are my notes to myself to remind future me why I did what I did. Although things have changed quite a lot, I started this site from Hemmingway2 which deserves a little ❤️ for making it open source.