After procrastinating on this for over a year, I finally gained the momentum to rebuild umarniz.com. I got the urge to rebuild this website with an integrated blog since the moment I shared my last blog post with a colleague. I noticed the annoying experience she had to read the article I wrote on Medium and it made me realize that even though I appreciate that more people find my posts through Medium when I share a link to an article I don't want them to go through this below-par experience and be forced to give their data to several suppliers on the way to reading what I write.

I went 'online' for the first time in 1997, since then I have done a lot of things that I would want to remember. Projects that I am proud of having worked on and thoughts that I would want to share even after I die and the first step to safeguard this vision is to collect what I want to be preserved. There are more steps I have to take in this direction but after a lot of procrastination that I am not proud of, I have managed to take the first step.

The technical details

The site is built using Gatsby and built on top of a theme created by Tania Rascia. I experimented with several frameworks as I wanted to brush my modern web development skills during this exercise but after several different attempts, I decided to use Gatsby. Gatsby provides incredible control over the performance and flexibility of this website, with sensible defaults and an extensible architecture it allows this website to be performing well across various devices and network connections.

The site is made with accessibility, performance, and privacy in mind. I wanted to learn how to make content more accessible which I have barely scratched the surface of but this site should have alternate titles for all visual content and should work well for color-blind individuals at least when not in dark mode. Performance of websites has a lot written on the internet so I will spare you the details but I do feel quite content with what this website delivers.

I want this to be a calm reading space for everyone including me. I hope you enjoy reading the content here as much as I like sharing my thoughts here!

Feel free to share your thoughts with me via links on the bottom of this page or via hey [at] umarniz.com