Hurray, thijslander.com is now online

You've probably already noticed, as you're reading this on my website, but I'm proud to announce that I've finally gotten this website up and running. This will be my new place to post whatever the hell I want. I will mostly be writing about whatever tech experiments I'm doing, whether that's web development, game development, or anything else I enjoy spending time on.

Before I dive into how I built it, I'd like you to know that the code is open-source and available on my GitHub. It's not perfect, but it's mine. And as I gave it an MIT license, it's now also yours. Sort of. Just know I'll probably keep updating it over time.

I decided to build it using Next.js, because I already had work experience with it. I've been working with Angular for years, but it didn't seem like the right tool for the job.

One of the most important constraints when building this website was cost. I knew I was going to end up running this website for probably the rest of my life, so I decided to go with platforms that have generous free tiers. For deployment, I went with Vercel. It's the most straightforward choice when building a Next.js app anyways.

For back-end data I ended up with Contentful, as it has an extremely generous free tier that I could probably never exhaust even if I wanted to. Contentful is a headless content management system. It's not a backend as a service, but rather a platform you can use to write articles on. There's a chance that I will eventually start replacing it with Supabase, but for now Contentful seemed like the right choice. For static content that didn't need a CMS, I used markdown files.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions on how I could improve this website, let me know! Feel free to create a GitHub issue, or send me an email!