This is my personal site. Here. Everything you see here was written by me (except for the framework). I have written and rewritten this site about 4 or 5 times since I realized I should have one. The first time I used Vue, since it was a new framework I was learning about and thought it was pretty cool to have component based sites. After Vue, I almost decided to just write it in plain HTML! But I realized I was in 2018 at the time so I better use a framework. I decided to take a look at React. React and Vue are pretty similar, because of the component based nature of both of them. Now, I decided to use Gatsby. I REALLY like Gatsby right now, because of the plugins it has. Specifically, the various transformer plugins that allows Gatsby to convert Markdown files into nice looking pages. This page is written in Markdown and is converted to this.
Vue is pretty nice for general reactive components. I learned it while taking a class on Software Engineering. My team used it to build a frontend for our project so I felt I had a decent enough understanding and like_(?)_ for it.
A little aside here, the best part of these frameworks is the component based nature of them. I love being able to write code once and keep reusing it.
Anyway, Vue's components are structured differently than React's.
Gatsby is awesome! I love using React since it's all JavaScript and the component based nature. Another great aspect of Gatsby is the plugin infrastructure. Plugins make Gatsby a lot more flexible than just having React components. My favorite plugin is a transformer plugin that coverts Markdown files into HTML to be displayed just like this page.
If you haven't looked at Markdown and are a techie, you really should. A lot of people in the software development field use Markdown for writing READMEs for GitHub or just for their reference. Markdown is just a format for how you write text. Its not quite code, but its also more than just text.
# Header 1
This is a regular paragraph.
```c
printf("Hello World.");
```As you can see in that snippet, Markdown is very easy to read without being converted to something else. Having this nice and easy way to write also helps in making you write faster. I no longer have to move my hands off of my keyboard, unless I need to refresh a page or answer a text. The way Markdown has you formatting your text just makes it quicker than a Word doc.