The Grand Unification Theory

Sometimes I feel like I spend a lot of my personal project time working on my own website. This, in turn, makes me wonder if I’m actually a closet narcissist. After all, in the words of master product designer Sir Jonathan Ive, “the work we do stands testament to who we are and what we care about.” In reality, of course, my own website is simply a very useful outlet for exploring and refining development patterns and skills. Coming up with new ideas for projects is hard; iterating on existing ideas is easier. Plus, finding good data sources is much less challenging when the subject matter is myself. Sir Jony is correct, of course, but in this case the work that stands testament to what I care about is less the site’s content than it is the site’s code and the effort I put into it.

All that being said … let me introduce you to the latest version of my website! 😆

For the past year, I’ve actually had three different personal websites involving four projects. I had my portfolio website, PhilipFulgham.com, the OG. Then I added my web resume, and finally a blog. There was also a database-backed API powering some of that. Four code repositories, three websites, two front-end frameworks, and a partridge squawking at me to make up my mind.

Okay, I may have imagined the partridge, but he was right! Even my efforts last year, amidst a job hunt, to create more consistency in my personal brand—while certainly improving things—fell short of providing the experience I wanted, both in the browser and the code editor. So, I considered the strongest traits of each of the three sites.

• The portfolio site had lots of info about my skills and projects, and the strongest sense of personal creativity.
• The resume was highly refined, with a finely tuned React codebase and a clean visual style/brand, plus the ability to be printable as an actual PDF or paper resume.
• The blog was a static site with Markdown-based content that allowed me to infinitely customize the presentation of my writing.

I decided to take these traits and combine them to create a single website that leverages all the benefits of the previous three without the fragmentation drawbacks. And to set it apart, I gave it a new domain name.

PhilipF5.dev is built with Gatsby, the popular React-powered static site generator. I created it by first combining my resume and blog codebases into one, adding portfolio pages, and then iterating on the result until everything worked seamlessly together. The entire site has a unified theme, with a dark mode and light mode. All content is now driven by Markdown and JSON, eliminating the need for a back-end API or database.

If you’re reading this post, that means you’re already on my new site, so go ahead and check it out!