My First Website
All right, this is going to sound either very dumb or interesting — I just created my first website after working in IT for more than 10 years.
Here is a story.
I started my career working on tools like C, C++, business objects etc for telecom companies like Ericsson, Siemens, Huawei etc and I was always the guy who wrote backend logic for call handling, roaming, and adding caller tunes (primarily popular in India), charging/rating for calls, SMS etc.
This was my bread and butter for a long time until recently when I switched to consulting company and started working on projects which involved full-stack development that’s when I started learning front-end tech like, javascript, react, typescript, CSS, material-UI etc
I was also looking at some ways to make passive income while working on my full-time job and hence thought to work on some ideas.
Birth of an idea
In Australia, I have seen people buying investment properties to save taxes, and make a side income from rent and hence I thought to explore that side a little bit to understand how it works.
As with everything on the internet, there are heaps of contradictory opinions and everyone has their perspective about what kinds of property one should or should not buy, which made me confused as a first-time property investor.
So instead of relying on people’s opinions, I looked at the historical & current data about properties, and statistics about what kinds of houses provide the best values for investors by learning and running a linear regression on statistics etc and came up with a simple idea.
Idea Execution
This is where I was about to navigate unknown paths (for me), as I never developed anything from scratch. Working on a company project is pretty different from working on something from scratch.
You have complete independence on which technologies to choose, where to deploy etc which is cool to say but also confusing because a developer wants to choose and work on the coolest tech stack available right?
However my thinking when I started was to first see if I can develop a working prototype and check if this would really add value and not just stay as a fancy side project.
So I choose jquery & bootstrap (i know you’re laughing), but hey that did the job along with some AWS stuff which I’m already aware of.
Soon the site was up & running and it worked fine.
Oh and I used AWS S3 to deploy my site, basically just copy all your files to S3 bucket with a single command and the static site is deployed.
aws s3 cp . s3://property-dashboard.link --recursive --exclude ".history/*"You might ask if it’s deployed on S3, which might be a static site, yes your assumption is correct, it’s a static site, which calls a bunch of APIs deployed through API Gateway, and lambda and ultimately stores user's data on S3.
I also used Cognito for authentication & authorisation.
Change of plan/tech
Soon I realised that I’m writing huge files and the code is messed up and it took longer to add new features which was counterproductive as I had only an hour to spare every day on it (while I was on the project), that’s when I decided to learn the cool tech that most of my friends were asking, NextJS.
And I decided to take a udemy course and implement my learning to renovate/revamp/modernise the site.
If you’re interested, please check out here It is still work-in-progress but would love to hear your feedback on any ways I could improve it. (I suck at UX :-) )
Wrap up
This is the beginning of my journey to make a website and hope it inspires you to learn something new too.
You can follow me on Twitter
