Reflections while migrating my old portfolio site

The world was a much different place when I landed my first internship as a glorified IT help desk attendant. I used to speedrun my work and spent the rest of each day learning Javascript, HTML, CSS, and a framework we often laugh at nowadays, AngularJS. Back then in Software Engineering, creating your own portfolio and writing it from scratch was a must, and that was my humble beginning. I’ve had an itch to start a software engineering blog and I’ve had some free time this holiday season so why not? The first thing I wanted to do though, was to archive my poor 2016 portfolio and save it elsewhere.

What boggles my mind is how the landscape of technologies (maybe just Javascript) has changed over the years. I’m sitting here re-installing Bower and Grunt, two technologies that you only heard about if you were in the frontend-space between the jQuery and React days. Looking back at some of the screenshots I included in my portfolio really brings me back, who even remembers the Sublime vs Atom vs Brackets editor war?

For nostalgia’s sake I went through the trouble of installing Node 8 and Python 2.7 (thank goodness for nvm and pyenv) just to compile my old portfolio site which you can find at https://legacy.alex-yeung.com. It contains a ton of technologies that have entirely disappeared from the modern software engineering space (good riddance), but to me it was truly where I came from and how I built my career to what it is now. I plan to write more about my journey, but until then this post will have to do.