Front-End Technologies

I had already used React Native to build Slurp, so learning React was a breeze. As with Slurp, I used the more modern implementation with functional components and create-react-app to get started. I have always been a huge fan of statically typed languages so I was really eager to try out typescript.

However, in my honest opinion, typescript was a little underwhelming, it seemed to create more problems than it solved. A bigger application is probably need for the compatibility troubles of TS to be outweighed by the benefits.

Being a bid fed up of bootstrap, I thought I would try a different CSS framework, although not flawless, bulma was a great catch, flexible but complete and extremely easy to use.

Being bilingual is an integral part of my upbringing and I wanted to capture that in my website. Although it is not strictly necessary to use external software, i18next makes programming a multilingual website seamless and very maintainable.

Deployment

I first experimented deploying with heroku which I have used before, but I found it to be very slow and a big hassle to configure the custom domain link. AWS Amplify on the other hand makes it incredibly easy.

Although with heroku you only have to type "git heroku push" to push to deployment, AWS Amplify takes it a step further allowing you to create a seamless workflow that automatically deploys with each push. A really handy for a low-stakes projected like this site.

Then used AWS Cloud Watch to get alerts if anything goes wrong and to monitor usage.