tyler faulkner

My Personal Website

I have always wanted to have a corner of the internet that I could call mine. After obtaining the skills I needed through my internship and college experience, I am now able to carve out a place of my own over the internet. One of the main reasons I created a personal website was to have a place to highlight many of the projects I have completed to showcase my skills. I also wanted to create a place where I can showcase different projects I work in the way I want to show them.

Original Site vs. Updated Site

This is not my first attempt at creating a personal website. In September 2022, I created a static webpage for my university's career fair. It included a professional summary, a photo of me, and links to my GitHub profile and LinkedIn profile. The site looked like the image below:

Picture of Old site

The new site is an all encompassing revamp compared to the old site. With the redesign, the entire site is now more dynamic and allows me to create and post my own content. The main reason for creating theis website was to be able to showcase my programming skills. This site is something I am proud I have put the time into creating.

Construction and Features of My Site

This site was constructed using using the Next.JS framework. This is my first time using the framework, but I was able to catch on to most of the framework easily. I have had previous experience using React through my classwork and my Senior Design Project at MSOE. The website is being hosted on AWS.

Many technologies are at play to get this website working. This is a 100% JavaScript based site on the frontend and backend using Next.JS which I already have mentioned. I also used MDX to create each of the tutorials and blog posts. Using the remark-math and rehype-katex plugins for MDX allowed me to type mathematical equations in my posts. I also used the remark-prism plugin to add styling for code snippets in the blog posts. One other prominent API I utilized was EmailJS to allow emails to be sent to me on the contact page.

Future Improvements

While I am happy with the site and I am launching it in its current state there are many additional features I would like to add in the future. Below are a few of the biggest features I want to add:

  • Filtering Posts by Languages/technologies
  • Search functionality for posts
  • Playground area to showcase live demos of projects

There are countless other features I would like to add, but the above are my main priority. This site is bound to change and adapt over time to fit my needs and to highlight my skills as a developer.