One of the main projects that I focused on in January was revitalizing components of my portfolio site that were not responsive during initial deployment back in October. I’ve detailed some of the elements in previous blog posts such as the restructuring of the project containers, the navigation bar, and updating the development skills. While building my portfolio site with React was a great test of my programming abilities, it’s also been a time-consuming process to implement certain features such as connecting the contact form and my email.
During my research, I encountered several walkthroughs that discussed nodeJS and express, but it kept leading to roadblocks in my code. Every time that I would attempt to create a back-end for the application or work with open source packages, it would conflict with other files and the server. The biggest problem that I faced was the code had changed so significantly that it led to other issues with the CSS and imports. By that point, the best solution was to clone my most recent repository from GitHub and start over.
Since this was hours that I had spent without any success, it reminded me of my old habits of wanting to find the answer during a single session instead of taking a break and coming back later. If the solutions that you’re trying to implement don’t work after several attempts, maybe focusing on something else that’s more productive could help reenergize you. I think sometimes when you come back to your code after a few hours, you start to brainstorm different strategies that you didn’t necessarily utilize before.
While connecting the contact form and my email through nodeJS and express or another process would be a great additional feature, it’s not the most crucial element of my portfolio site considering that my email is accessible through a variety of sources such as LinkedIn and Learn. This doesn’t mean that I won’t come back to it at some point, but I want to invest my time in creating new front-end projects and finishing the other goals that I’ve set up for myself. This includes recording updated demos for the portfolio projects and deploying them to Heroku as live showcases.