My Resume- A DO Hackathon Submission

What I built

I built a personal portfolio using Gatsby (JS and CSS), for entry in the DO X DEV App Platform Hackathon. Although I am an employee of DigitalOcean, I wanted to provide a resource for the dev community and new engineers learning Gatsby and thought this was a fun way to contribute.

Category Submission:

I'm submitting this portfolio app for the Personal Portfolio category of the hackathon.

App Link

You can find a direct link to my portfolio page as hosted on App Platform here, or on my own domain here.

Screenshots

Here's the source code:

And the published app:

Description

My Resume is a minimalist portfolio, including sections for social, projects, contact, and about content.

Link to Source Code

You can find the link to the live app's source code here.

Permissive License

I am using an MIT License.

Background

I started this personal portfolio during a job search, to brush up on Gatsby and continue my practice with writing clean code. It's based on the Gatsby Starter Code, and I initially hoped it would be used by new engineers as a starting point to create their own portfolios. I submitted my portfolio app through the hackathon to amplify and spread open source love.

How I built it

Ideation and Build Process

I started building this application by following the tutorials within the Gatsby Documentation, using the Hello World Starter as the base of my app.

As I started to learn more about how to create layouts and connect resources within Gatsby, I iterated on the base code and added a particle and other CSS effects, augmented the CSS a bunch, and played around with sections and content placement until I felt happy. My intention was to create a clean starting point for new developers, so I was careful not to add anything that wasn't easily identifiable in the code.

After testing across browsers and within my local environment, I pushed my code up to Github:

Then, I popped over to App Platform and signed in to DigitalOcean. I clicked the Create button near the top, and Apps, to be taken to the App Platform. From there, I followed the steps to deploy my app.

Deploying to App Platform

The first step was to connect my code:

Then I selected a repository.

Next, I named my app and made other changes:

And configured my app.

Finally, I picked my plan:

And was off to the races.

In the meantime, I wanted to add a personal domain, so I headed over to the Add Domain section:

And then went over to Namecheap to change my nameservers.

When I came back, my app was deployed! It took about 15 minutes for my domain to propagate, and then I was live.

It was my first time using App Platform (I know, for shame right?), and as an engineer, found it to be a really fluid, enjoyable experience unlike those I've had with other hosting platforms. I'd def use App Platform to deploy other apps- I have a Rails app in mind that I'd love to work on next!

Additional Resources/Info

Thanks for considering my app. I hope it is of use to the dev community.♥