Photography Portfolio

Background

I have been practicing photography since 2015 and have hosted my photography portfolio using Squarespace since 2017. When I was learning about web development I saw this as the perfect first project as I didn’t particularly enjoy spending several hundred dollars every year on Squarespace.

Implementation

This site has been built and re-built too many times to count over the past couple years. Initially it was with vanilla HTML and CSS, then server-side rendered using Express and EJS templates and hosted on Google Cloud. Once, while on a React binge, I built the whole site as a single-page application; but quickly realized my mistake when it was deployed and the initial load took 30 seconds. The most recent rebuild has been as a multi-page static-site using Astro and hosted on Github Pages.

A function of this site that I am proud of is the ability to quickly add and remove photos and albums through only the file system with no need for a JSON map. This maintains the principle of DRY coding (Don’t Repeat Yourself).

Lessons

I’ve learned many lessons and best practices by building this site over and over. The most valuable has been to keep things as simple as possible when choosing a framework. For a basic site such as this, with minimal user interactivity, there is no need for a virtual dom, state management, or any of the other awesome features provided by React and it’s counterparts.

A statically generated site with islands of interactivity is perfect for this application and Astro is as blazingly fast as advertised.