The big moment of opening the website to the world has finally come. On August 11, 2019, exactly 8 and a half months ago, I decided to put an old dream into practice: to have a space on the internet that's truly mine, where I could show my projects and thoughts without the limitations of social networks.
A project that started out shyly on weekends grew into something much bigger. The image below tells a story:
Commit history in the project's repository
I started the project strong in August and kept adding features. I already had a few years of experience building Django applications, so the idea was to add only what was needed and launch the website.
September came and the project turned out to be harder than I had imagined. Making a mediocre website really isn't hard; using a ready-made template or another project as a base would also have made the process much easier; but doing everything from scratch, with the goal of learning as much as possible from this project, turned out to be a real challenge, much bigger than I had imagined.
Once my college exams were over, and determined to finish the website by October, I started working on it on weekdays too, to add everything I thought was needed. There was a problem: the backend, although incomplete, already had what it needed, but the frontend was simply hideous. There was just no way to launch the website like that and, with tasks piling up at the end of the semester and a change of internship, I had to put the project on hold. Looking at the images below of how the design was back then and how it turned out, I think you'll understand why I was so frustrated with the design.
The website's old homepage
The website's current homepage
The website's old contact page
The website's current contact page
November went by and my focus was entirely on college. December came and the only update was to a package that was out of date and could compromise the project's security. But 2020 finally arrived, and this was going to be the good year (lol).
In January, I took a step back to learn more about web design and started using Webflow to prototype the project's screens. It took a while, but little by little the project took on a friendlier shape, closer to what I wanted (and very close to what it is today). For anyone in a situation like the one I was in, I highly recommend this Webflow University tutorial playlist, which was largely responsible for my leap forward in design.
In February, I started moving the design I had made in Webflow into the project's code. Since exporting code is a paid feature there, and I already wanted to change a few things using what I knew of Bootstrap, I did it entirely by hand: I looked at what I had made there and replicated it in the project's code. Almost a month of work and many commits later, the project was almost ready, or so I thought...
At the end of February and the beginning of March, I decided it was time to put the website on a server to hear people's feedback. I chose the hard way: I rented an empty Linux server at Linode and installed Apache, a firewall and an SSL certificate, and I even used crontab to automatically pull the project's updates with git. The closer I thought the project was to being ready, the more problems I found that needed solving.
The end of March and the beginning of April came with terrible news: the coronavirus pandemic had fully arrived in Brazil and São Paulo had to go into quarantine. Despite all the problems this brought to my life and to the lives of millions of people, I suddenly found myself with a lot more time to finish this project (after all, with no commuting in a city like São Paulo and no way of going out for fun, there weren't many other ways to pass the time).
April arrived for good, and with it a decision: to move the server from Linode to Heroku. Why? I found out that, as a student, I was entitled to credits on Heroku, US$175.00 to be exact (which, at US$7.00 a month, would pay for 25 months of hosting without spending a cent of my own). With the dollar-to-real exchange rate not at its best, this was a big factor in the decision.
With all that, here we are, with the website 100% working (at least the part you can see). There's still a long way to go, but at least the first step has been taken: I stopped trying to make this project perfect, because in the end it never will be; there will always be something I'll want to change and update. And that's what makes this project so interesting: it's an ongoing lab where I can try out and show what I learn along the way.
Finally, I'll end with this screenshot I took on registro.br (the official registry of domains ending in .br) of the date I bought the domain lavedonio.com.br:
For those who can't see it in the image, the domain was registered on April 13, 2016
This is a long-standing project that I tried to get started many times. It's nice to stop and look at the whole road traveled and, finally, be able to say that a New Year's resolution has been accomplished.
Goals for 2020
If you'd like to see more technical details of the project, check out its page in the website's projects section and the project on GitHub.
Thank you all!
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