Personal Website

What it is:

• A unified website for my blog and portfolio built with Svelte.js
• A platform for technical writing and data journalism that meets my criteria:
• Quick pageloads
• Simple project structure & development experience
• Intuitive style assignment within components
• Easy implementation of data viz tools (Mapbox, D3, scrollytelling)

What I did:

• Used the Blogdown and Distill packages to build portfolio and blog websites, respectively, in R
• Rebuilt my Distill blog in React for better performance and full control over visualizations and styling
• Converted blog to Svelte.js for simpler workflows for data journalism tasks (animation, data viz)
• Added portfolio content to Svelte blog to unify blog and portfolio for the first time

What I learned:

• Frontend frameworks
• React
• Svelte
• ES6 JS basics
• Styling
• Responsive layouts
• CSS Modules in React
• CSS Grid & Flexbox
• Sass
• Component style-scoping in Svelte

Why it interests me:

• I am very opinionated about design and interaction in data visualization
• I did not have enough control over these details and learned new tools to accomplish this
• There is little discussion or consensus on the intersection of data science and web development
• The future of R may rely on better support for rich interactivity in data visualization