Develop a personal website or blog.

“Let’s start with internationalization. Translating every element on the site is exhausting—especially maintaining consistency across languages. And when you add something new, you have to translate that too. But once done, it’s very rewarding. I’ll even write about how I handle it without libraries. Another challenge was portability. The site was heavy—even on desktop—imagine on mobile! I created a carousel to navigate between screens with animations, but performance still worried me. Most Brazilian users are on mid or low-end phones. I had to create mobile-specific components, which drastically improved performance. I didn’t have time to make the site super responsive yet, but that’s coming in the next update. Despite thinking through mobile UX, navigation still suffered. Desktop buttons weren’t very mobile-friendly. I’ll talk about this in a future post about responsiveness. Lastly, I had to learn about SEO. After building social media apps for a year, SEO was new to me. I had to map my routes with sitemap.xml and robots.txt and use Next.js Metadata and OpenGraph tags for previewing on X and WhatsApp. Honestly, it was fun. I think I’ll reuse this base in future projects, maybe even turn it into a library.”

“Over the years, I have learned (and re-learned) one specific lesson when it comes to projects - pick one thing new. In this case, I had two new things. The Zola piece was easy enough. They provide a tutorial for getting started that does a good job of explaining how the pieces connect. By the end of it, you have a good idea of what's going on. However, when it came time to building the components for the site, I quickly realized I had no real sense of UX design. I quickly understood just how reliant I had been on frameworks dictating the feel for me, I literally never had to think about it. I ended up going down a rabbit hole of looking for tailwind examples or snippets that I could take from and start building what I needed. This only increased my resentment, almost pushing me to the point of dropping tailwind for bootstrap. It was "too hard" and I just "didn't get it". Eventually I forced myself to sit down and just play around with it. After some hours of fiddling around, I was at least at a point where I could start working on the site.”