My b-links Journey (part 1)

From the Top...

B-links started very much as a concept for a highly accessible, performant site, which would serve as a library of useful links - for myself as much as anyone - and a blog... a small outlet for my thoughts.

It has been an interesting journey so far, building both a minimalist front-end and an API simultaneously, as well as a management portal to let me easily add blog posts and links, but I've really enjoyed it, from the first sketches that I scribbled on a piece of my son's drawing paper, to getting a semi-working page deploying out to GitHub Pages.

I guess a lot of it has been pulling together a number of my various skill-sets, from UI and UX design, to front-end development and also configuring of build pipelines and deployments. But there has been a lot I've learned along the way - designing and deploying a MongoDB database, and using Azure functions to serve as an API have been just a couple of areas that I've never touched on previously.

After scribbling that first design, which was mostly some high level doodles with some annotations and more questions than answers, I've slowly built up a picture of what 'this' should be, and started to work on it, iterating as I go. I've recently heard Mike McQuaid from GitHub talk about his best project ever and one of the big takeaways from that was to:

'...fail faster and improve faster.'

This has been one of the most important parts of developing b-links... trying to iterate regularly, constantly reviewing what I've done to see what works and what doesn't, and I think has been one of the great successes of the whole project!