What makes a website tick?
The redesign of my personal portfolio website is something that has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while. Don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for a nice web 1.0 static website with a random bunch of default bootstrap components and loading times of minutes, but the design really was starting to lose its luster.
In the meanwhile my understanding of what makes a real web application tick had grown significantly. Not only had I tested my hands with more substantial projects in my free time, but it became my full time job to manage a portfolio of ERP web applications.
Going into this, my knowledge of back-end technologies was getting good, especially with Django (one of the most widespread Python web-frameworks), but my experience with front-end development was pretty much non-existent. Armed with some basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, I decided to attend a course on Vue.js on Udemy.
Given that at work I am exposed and sometimes get my hands dirty with similar technologies, this wasn't completely new to me, and grasping the few core concept of responsive app design didn't take a long time. As a matter of fact, I soon ditched the course (which was nothing to write home about anyway), and started getting my hands dirty with the code.
And so it begins
This is usually the point in which I start to get drawn into my work and everything else becomes secondary until I'm finished.
I have a problem with these kinds of projects: they draw out a somewhat obsessive nature in me. I think I have a problem in general with anything that involves a clearly defined start, but a not-so-clearly defined end. You see, I like to get things done. I like the rush that you feel when you finish something and you can close out that subject or task. I also like efficiency and optimization, especially when what's being optimized is my time - in the end, it's probably our most precious asset. This is probably also why I'm a very fast eater, even though I know fully well how bad that is for my health.
Conversely, I don't like leaving things unfinished, not completed. It eats me from the inside, the thought of something left unfinished will make its way into my every waking thought (and sometimes sleeping too), until I'm back working on completing said thing. This is to say that any time I work on a project like this, I become a very annoying partner to my wife, as my ability to concentrate on anything else starts to evaporate.
The issue with front-end
I hope you can see where this is going: while working on API microservices projects has a clear end-state, which achieves the desired automation, logic or behavior, anything involving a design is a potentially endless project to a perfectionist like me. Perhaps this is why, although I really like working on design, it is not something that I ever tried to pursue professionally.
So there I was, even when the website was both functionally complete and aesthetically pleasing, visiting it on every occasion and obsessing over every detail, every animation, and creating tasks for myself to adjust this font color or that padding distance as soon as I'd have the chance.
Now the website looks great (to me, at least), and it has reached the level of functionality that I was initially aiming for, but I still find myself noticing weird interactions and visual glitches and fixing them on my free time. What's even worse, I now see them on every website I visit, with a substancial difference: in that case I cannot fix the issues and I have to live with it!