This site is a dedicated side project designed to serve as my professional digital hub. It bridges the gap between my enterprise experience at CGI Federal and my personal technical explorations.

🚀 Project Goals

• Professional Showcase: Place to show off my technical skills, background and experiences.
• Learn Web Development: I wanted to learn this skill to use in future projects, mainly creating a website for the church.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Framework: Astro (Static Site Generation)
• Styling: Tailwind CSS
• Deployment: Netlify with CI/CD integration
• Content: Markdown-driven data collections for projects and work history

This was a great learning experience for me. I bought the domain for this site and kept telling myself, “I’ll get around to making that site sometime.” For the new year, I decided that now was the time to sit down and get it done.
The first step was choosing the tech stack. I chose the Astro web framework because it fit the scope of what I was wanting perfectly. For the small sites I planned to build, I didn’t need a full dynamic web application framework such as Ruby on Rails or React. Static side generation seemed to be the middle ground with room to expand using the Astro island architecture. Being able to add content using markdown files, as well as the option to easily add a CMS in the future was another reason to pick Astro.

I picked the hosting platform, Netlify, due mostly to the price. It is hard to beat free! The sign-up was simple as pointing to my GitHub repo and saying build! Again, there is some room to expand here if I ever needed to.

I plan on updating this site with any new projects I work on.