Personal and professional site written with vanilla web standards and a little lit-html, hosted on AWS at aidan-sawyer.com.
This site was made as:
- a front-facing hub to introduce myself to those who don't know me (or want to know more) [
about,resume] - a space to track and show my ongoing work and personal portfolio. [
about,projects] - a place for me to coordinate and display my current thoughts and interests [
blog] - an exercise and exhibition of my skills, design principles, and approach
prerequisites:
$ npm install -g npx
$ npm installrunning:
$ npm run start| page | description |
|---|---|
| home | welcome, introduction, and worklog |
| about | resume for employers displaying data from atla5/resume |
| projects | list of projects with descriptions stored in projects.json |
| talks | presentations and workshops I've given over the years, fed by presentations.json |
A huge motivating design concept I've grown to appreciate this year (2019) is the principle of least power. I speak about it in the about page, so I won't belabor the point too much here, but suffice it to say, the workings of this site are incredibly simple - and they're meant to be. Try disabling javascript and reloading the page, and you'll see most of the functionality remains intact due to a corollary focus on progressive enhancement and graceful degradation.
Another main principle implemented in the design of this website (and a central tenant of my general design philosophy) was the principle of the 'separation of concerns' (also known as 'functional decomposition', or 'single responsibility' and linked closely with the 'unix philosophy').
This drive to reduce higher-order requirements into sub-systems and components helped to:
| increase... | by reducing... |
|---|---|
| understandability | individual complexity |
| maintainability | size (cognitive chunks) |
| agility/flexibility | coupling between systems |
| speed | extraneous/irrelevant pieces |
| focus/clarity | to essentials |
Specific examples of the implementations of this principle can be seen in the use of
- multiple repositories instead of a monolithic entity with many parts
- distributed json storing data where it belongs (next to what it's describing)
- functional css for reusable elements of singular description/content
- restricted scope such that each repo is useful and justifiable unto itself
- simplify design/scope - ensure everything that can/should be is decoupled, independent, and quick
- optimize tech/loading - reduce dependency load and avoid loading everything at once
- custom domain - move to
aidan-sawyer.cominstead of using the boilerplateatla5.github.io - consume utils/css - extract the common css (e.g.
.pam,.large-text) into atla5/utils - implement the blog - to live-load entries from atla5/blog using showdownjs
- add lib-re subdomain to showcase my work on library/archive/museum (LAM) tech