Hello World!

Hello, you. And welcome to my new “handmade” personal site / blog / portfolio !

I say “handmade” meaning I wanted to create the project structure and style myself, only using a foundational framework, in this case SvelteKit.

Why SvelteKit?

Well to first answer this question there is another question to answer: why Svelte at all? To answer that, I will do a quick recap’ of my experience, sorry if you don’t care that much. 😉

Back in my days…

I’m really not a “front dude”, I entered the wonderful world of programming at 12 years old by learning C and C++, thanks to the great Site du Zéro website (now better known as OpenClassrooms).

Why program at this age? Because I wanted to make video games, that’s why. And i still want it, I’m doing it when I have the time! (when you are passionate, you don’t know when to stop).

So yeah, I’m more of a system/backend/game dude with interest in UI and aesthetics in general thanks to my gamedev passion (and I still have very much to learn in this field).

After C and C++, I learned HTML4, CSS2, and not much JavaScript. (I was like 13 at the time, and it was crazy to see your dummy website live). At the time, I was using templates found online, editing them to do what I needed without understanding much about it, but years passed and I was learning more and more.

When I was 17, I started my Computer Science studies, and so during 5 years, I was learning programming at school and at home, so I could improve my skills every year on multiple domains, but still with a focus on system/backend subjects. I fondly remember the OpenGL classes which was mindblowing, doing 3D stuff only with code!

My frontend quest

During that time, I also did front stuff, at first with the venerable jQuery, then Angular JS. I never released anything at this time, and I also played with the Phaser HTML game framework.

Five years later, I started to work as a web developer at the end of my studies, then learned React and discovered next-generation JavaScript thanks to Babel. And that’s now the JavaScript framework I use the most. At first with the ES6 classes, then the functional components, then with TypeScript! And in the end, the famous React hooks.

I’m still using React at work with TypeScript, and a little on my personal projects. I also used Docusaurus, notably for my previous personal site.

But I wanted something else, something as capable but less complex. So I tried Vue, and it didn’t really clicked for me. To me it looks like something in between React and Angular, maybe one day I will come back to it. But I wanted something drastically different.

Svelte, the contender

So I read about Svelte. I read all of the official documentation, and played with it a little. Then, it clicked. It was amazing! The ease of use, the speed, it just worked.

I quickly did my first released application with it: the GitHub Notifier, an application I already did with React before. And boy it was refreshing! The final code is simpler and easier to manage. The slot system is really great.

Then, i learned about SvelteKit. Looked like a great candidate to replace Docusaurus with a lighter and less opinionated alternative, even if I had to do more things manually.

So that’s what I did, and what you’re seeing right now.

Then what?

Well, I hope to write more blog posts, on other topics.

As I said before, I’m more of a backend/game dude and what I like the most nowadays is mostly Rust, my spiritual successor to C++, a language I love to write in.

I’m also using Godot Engine and GDScript to write games, and I would like to write about that too.

So we will see what will happen next.