Tools I used to build my site

  • Next.js 13 App Router
    • There's a lot of static content to my portfolio so things in this app aren't too complex (yet?). But I love the way that the App Router works as far as organizing my code and the mental model I get to build.
  • Contentlayer
    • This tool makes it so that you get strongly typed MDX. Something I've always felt was a shortcoming of MDX was that I could break my code by not meeting the format that it's expecting with missing frontmatter in my Markdown files. Contentlayer adds some guardrails to make it so I am forced to get it right.
  • React
    • Ya know it, ya love it, ya code it. I know there's a lot of discord out there about React and frontend frameworks but I'm not very opinionated. I like shipping. The first thing I learned was React and I've sort of just kept shipping with it over the years.
  • Tailwind
    • I didn't hop on the Tailwind train for a long time. Now I won't ever build anything without it. See previous point about shipping.
  • TypeScript
    • Stay (type)safe, folks. I'm honestly not sure I could write pure JavaScript anymore.
  • pnpm
    • I like getting the dependencies into my projects faster. pnpm was a revelation for me. Every time I hop back into npm and yarn projects, I instantly yearn to get back to pnpm. A true gamechanger.
  • Vercel
    • Deploying webscale frontends is a solved problem. One day, I'll take the deep dive into building a Frankenstein infrastructure just for fun. But if I'm looking for shipping velocity, I'm using Vercel.
  • Lucide icons
    • I had never used this icon set before! I quite like it!
  • React Wrap Balancer
    • This is a small but powerful library from a developer that I have massive respect for, Shu Ding. It ensures that blocks of text (commonly headers) are broken up with similar length when they have to be split on different lines.
  • @vercel/og
    • Dynamically generate OpenGraph images at the edge. This makes it so that I don't have to create an OG image for my pages. Instead, they will be generated with code.
  • next-themes
    • Handling light mode/dark mode! Sets to your system by default but let's you use the switcher in the top right if you want to change things up.

But, Anthony, what about all the dependencies of dependencies of dependencies that you're not listing here?

Yeah, yeah, I know. This is mostly a list of the big stuff and a few new things that I enjoyed playing with.