I made my first website back in 2000, when I was just 12 years old. I had the opportunity to take a technology class in middle school. That class sparked my passion for code and making the internet look cool.
Believe it or not, my first personal webpage was on the NeoPets website. I was obsessed with everything that is cringy now: flaming text, audio that played on page load, and frames. Oh, frames...
More than anything, I wanted my own domain name, but was stuck with free subdomains for the time being. I went from NeoPets to Angefire (remember them?), and then was able to purchase my first domain in 2007. I was so excited.
I remember starting out with PHP on that domain, and discovered the awesomeness (at the time) that was PHP includes. My first step to the DRY principle! I'd also used Wordpress and Blogger, but always preferred to write everything from scratch - silly me.
In 2018 I learned VueJS and Nuxt, and launched my previous iteration of maiko.dev with Nuxt. I also started using Prismic, which is now my CMS of choice. I only discovered Tailwind CSS a few years ago and am obsessed.
This site uses ReactJS and Next, which were a bit of a learning curve coming from Vue and Nuxt. The similarities between React and Vue were enough to keep me interested, and I can definitely see why React is so widely-used. It takes more to configure, but I think that's one of the things I like about it.
This project is over 20 years in the making. It's gone through dozens of redesigns and several name changes, but it's always been my pet project.