NextJS

Sanity

TypeScript

React

SCSS

Styled Components

Software Development

Visit Site

This resume website is a hub for my projects, and ground zero for my exploration of the latest web technologies.

Design Objectives

A visually stunning website, which anyone can understand, and the technically minded can appreciate.

Straightforward

This website is designed primarily to showcase projects, which are front and centre on the homepage. It's all about showcasing the things I find interesting and can show off to the world.

Responsive

Responsiveness can refer to a website's ability to render nicely on a variety of devices, and to the speed at which it responds to interaction. Here, I refer to both meanings.

Eye Catching

Selective use of animations and unusual components, in ways where their use does not impede the user experience, serves to elevate the website from a simple portfolio.

sasharesume - light vs dark themes

Technical Overview

sasharesume is built primarily using my favourites among the latest web technologies.

Framework

The fundamental technology underlying sasharesume is React.JS. React was chosen due to its popularity, and thus the active community and vast selection of libraries, namely for animation and rendering.

Rendering

NextJS is responsible for the high performance of sasharesume.

Styling

This is the last of my websites to use styled components. I intend to move the styling of this site to scss modules. However, until that is done, it will continue using styled-components.

styled-components and SASS provide styling for sasharesume. Compared with alternatives like tailwindcss, this combination of technologies minimizes code duplication and ensures consistency and responsiveness.

On sasharesume, styles are defined in two parts. First, variables are defined and derived in SASS and then components are built out in styled-components.

Variable Derivations - SASS

In my approach to CSS, many project-wide variables are defined in SASS as variables, with overrides for things like color theme preference and viewport size.

/* Color derivations */
$accent: #0e9fff;
$complement: complement($accent);
$complement_bg: lightest($complement);

:root {
  --accent: #{$accent};
  --complement: #{$complement};
  --complement-bg: #{$complement_bg};
}

Note here the use of functions like `complement` and `lightest`. These are SASS Functions which abstract away some colour science and simplify the design process. Inspired by sitepoint, the palette system on sasharesume reduces the complex work of choosing complementary sets of colors for the site to a simple declaration of 1 primary colour.

Additionally, SASS variables are used to simulate some useful tailwindcss style classes for easy use in styled components.

$border-radii: (
  none: 0,
  sm: 0.125rem,
  default: 0.25rem,
  md: 0.375rem,
  lg: 0.5rem,
  xl: 0.75rem,
  '2xl': 1rem,
  '3xl': 1.5rem,
  full: 9999px,
);

@each $size, $value in $border-radii {
  .rounded-#{$size} {
    border-radius: $value;
  }
  :root {
    --rounded-#{$size}: #{$value};
  }
}

These style variables allow for highly modular styling, with consistent values for components throughout the site.

Re-Usable Blocks - Styled Components

Using styled-components leads to the most readable and re-usable styling code.

export const SSecondaryButton = styled(SProjectLinkButton)`
  background: var(--gray-200);
  color: var(--gray-700);
  &:hover {
    background: var(--gray-300);
`

In this example, we benefit from all of the pros of our past approach:

• Declarative styles allow code re-use, see the inheritance from `SProjectLinkButton`
• SCSS variables allow for instant, and idiot proof dark theme support, and theme-consistent colours.
• Component format styles allow for easily readable JSX in content rendering components, and separation of concerns (styling vs content)

The ideal styling solution

By combining the power of SASS Variables and derivations and styled-components, we achieve great code re-use, modularity, separation of concerns, not to mention small bundle size.

Content Management

Sanity CMS was the choice for content management for sasharesume due to it's excellent developer-first architecture and it's amazing extensibility. To help use Sanity's at times cumbersome schema, query, and type definition syntax, I developed a custom meta language and graphical tool for defining Sanity Schemas.

Animation

CSS animations are the best tool for web animation, and pure CSS is the ideal way to handle animations on any website if possible to minimize bundle size and maximize performance.

Due to the complexity of some of the animations on sasharesume, some bigger tools were brought in. Namely, Framer Motion.

Framer Motion's most prominent use on sasharesume is in the swipe page transitions. Using `AnimatePresence` and `popLayout`, sasharesume has uniquely fluid and elegant page transitions, which do not require the view transitions API which is currently not well supported (as of 2023).

      <TransitionContainer id={"outer-transition-container"}>
        <AnimatePresence mode={'popLayout'}>
          <TransitionInterior
            transition={transition}
            key={pathname}
            initial={initial}
            animate={animate}
            exit={exit}
            onAnimationStart={() => {
              const hashArg = window.location.hash
              if (pathname !== '/' && !hashArg ) {
                  const outer = document.getElementById('outer-transition-container')
                  if (outer) {
                    outer.scrollTop = 0
                  }
              }
            }}
            id="page-transition-container"
          >
            {component}
            <Footer footer={settings?.footer} />
          </TransitionInterior>
        </AnimatePresence>
      </TransitionContainer>

Custom Libraries

tbsui, my in house library for reactive animated components is prominently used on sasharesume for several key effects. Namely, the text cascade animation on the homepage, navigation menus are tbsui components.