programming this website was such a pain

Dang

Programming this website has been such a chore. I have fun doing it, kind of, cuz I love computer programming, but man. There's so much to do. Mostly a crap ton of refactoring. I wrote the first version of this site in React way back in like 2021, using Vite and React Router. I hosted it on Firebase Hosting. I built it using Vite. The code was ugly, but it functioned. That served me well for a while. But I kept wanting to add more stuff to the site, so I made a bunch of changes over the years and continued piling more code on top of the ever-growing pile of ugly ass code.

Flash forward to 2023. I want to migrate to NextJS because the routing is cool. And because I can statically generate blog posts like this one. And because I just generally want to do more with the site. And also for a bunch of other reasons. So I pick my site up and switch hosting platforms to Vercel and build the site using NextJS's SSG feature. And this is the first time I'm looking at the code in a while, so when I look at it, it's hella ugly and unreadable and I have no clue what I'm looking at. I wrote it in JSX. Not a single type declaration anywhere to be found. It's confusing. So I have to sit there and figure out what everything is and what everything does in order to make the migration happen and not break anything. And that takes forever. Ouch. Oof. But I get it done.

Now it's 2024 and I'm mostly done with the site migration, but in order to make my site more easily maintainable in the future, I get to work refactoring the living hell outta everything. Rewriting code, tidying stuff up, getting rid of nonsense I don't need, god it was so much work. In TypeScript this time. But now everything's lookin' clean. And the site will for sure be easier to interact with as a developer going forward. So was it worth it? Yeah, probably. Just took a long time.