The back story:
Between May 2016 – May 2018, I transitioned from an individual contributor to a leader and manager of a team of four developers. Instead of being the primary developer from start to finish on large projects– I was doing more oversight and contributing smaller tactical components of many projects.
My website got to a point where I hadn’t updated it in years. I left it “under construction” for over a year while I tried to figure out which direction to go with it.
I’ve maintained my website as a portfolio and blog since college: from Flash & ActionScript, to Joomla, and finally on WordPress, where it’s seen several iterations. I kept all of my old work throughout the years either as a detailed portfolio item or blog post. Once a portfolio item would no longer represent my current sills, I’d convert it into a blog post. I loved seeing my growth: it was a great way to combat my own imposter syndrome. The downside is that maintaining all of those screenshots, screen capture videos, descriptions, and code bases became a large burden.
I got back in the swing of finishing my WordPress theme and site content right around when Gutenberg was becoming a reality. I decided to go that direction, and took a Javascript for WordPress bootcamp, which included Gutenberg. The hardest step in all of this was how to develop my content to describe what I had been up to for the past ~9 years.
Well, you’re looking at the final result. I decided to focus on the balance of being a player-coach by separating my homepage and my sections of content into two: me as a developer and me as a manager/leader/director— and then, of course, the supporting pages and posts.
The tech:
- Hosting (that I love) on SiteGround
- Gulp
- Sass
- Foundation CSS for some helper things like breakpoints, grid, etc.
- WordPress
- Custom Theme based on Underscores
- Version control on GitHub
The features:
- Shortcode: time since, for calculating days since an inputted date, as seen on my homepage.
- Interactive Timeline, as seen on My Time at BU
- with Tipped.js
- Shortcode: to pull in “static” content
- Custom Post type: Quotes Repository, with 2 different views: listing and slideshow
- Workflow status taxonomy & visual icons (needs copy, needs link check, needs images, ready, etc.)
- Responsive Tables, as seen on:
- Speaking, Guest Talks, Teaching
- Professional Development
- With a filter to show different types
- Shortcode to display icons
- Fancybox upgrade to Gallery Block, as seen in the Screenshots section below
- Custom Dashboard widgets for things like listing all my pages, listing the most recently edited pages/posts, and listing any unfinished posts.
- A metabox to add additional classes to the <body> tag, for use much like a feature flag or utilities/helper class.
- Some personal features:
- Maps of places I’ve been and places I’d like to go — via WP Google Maps, with some customizations.
- Responsive table of books I’ve read
Screenshots:
Future updates:
- Comply with WordPress best practices by moving most of this functionality into a plugin(s), leaving the theme to just be a theme
- Retrieve some of my historical portfolio items and blog posts, as mentioned above
- A Gutenberg Block I’m almost done refining: Professional Development Table
- Full-site Gutenberg editing