Freelance Project

A couple of weeks ago, I agreed to re-do a website for my aunt for their business. He and my uncle run a real estate appraisal consulting firm out of San Francisco with a focus on green building. They aren't huge, and they're looking to stay that way. It will never be a site that generates a ton of traffic, but they still want to stand out from the rest of the crowd. Part of their mission statement is that they believe in taking a new-school approach blended with old-school. With that in mind, they want their website to appear more modern than the competition. Right now, their website is a Wordpress site hosted on Bluehost. At this point, I don't have any interest in Wordpress sites, so I told her if I were to take it on, I would build it from scratch. Their site is entirely static, so I'm thinking I'm going to do it in Gatsby with either Bootstrap or Material UI as a component library. Since they aren't collecting data in any way and they have no user login or really much of any functionality in their site, I think I'm just going to host it on Netlify and go completely serverless. The site itself isn't going to be too crazy to reconstruct, but I think the biggest hurdle for me is going to be migrating it off of Bluehost and onto Netlify. I have no idea how to decouple the Domain Name and their G Suite account from their Bluehost account, but I'm sure I can figure it out eventually.

I've already had my CS Prep course for the day, and I don't have another one until Monday. We had some issues getting a babysitter for the day, so I had to skip out a bit early on the class, unfortunately. I was able to catch the entirety of the lecture, but I wasn't able to participate in the pair programming session, which I think is the most important part. I did, however, end up doing the problems from the pair programming and I turned in the solutions to my instructor. I also had a pair programming session with another guy in class last night, which didn't go as smoothly as we had planned. We spent a good amount of time getting stuck on a certain problem from the CSX series, before finally figuring out a working solution. We then moved onto a CodeWars problem that we totally hit a brick wall on. I figured out the solution today, but I think my partner got a bit frustrated. He's only been learning JavaScript for about a month, and is off to a great start. However, this is one of the most frustrating things I've ever learned, and you spend a lot of time pulling out your hair. That's just part of the process.

I think I'll spend the rest of the night setting up the scaffolding of the site and reviewing some old Gatsby projects to get some ideas of how to set up the basis of the project. It's been about 3 or 4 weeks since I've touched Gatsby, and it's going to take a little bit to get the juices flowing with this framework again. I'm thinking about it now, and there are a lot of moving parts that go into a Gatsby site, like the layout, SEO, the config, and so much more. If I take a look at my old code and maybe watch a brief tutorial, I think I can get the scaffolding done, at least. From there, the site itself really isn't that extensive. There is definitely the possibility of using something like Contentful as a CMS for some blog articles and what not, but I'm not sure if I want to go that route or not. Hopefully, I can get a good start on it tonight; it's always much easier to work on something once I get past the start.

Until tomorrow!