We've launched our website! It took a little while but its finally up and running (kind of) for the first time.

The Stack - Technical Side

For the first time, our team has a real website! It's made with Nextjs for decent load-size and speed while keeping the interactivity and community support of React. We're also using tailwind for styling in an attempt to have a fast-ish development time and lower the cost of iteration/changing things.

Animations

The fancy animations (including background) were all made with framer-motion. While its not the most performant and the developers probably didn't envision it being used this way, it works and provides us easy to use animations.

Blogs

All the blog posts will be written in markdown for easy reading and writing for all!

Thanks to react-markdown and a couple extensions we can support fancier features like $\LaTeX$ for maths! It also supports the Github Flavoured Markdown, such as tables and strikethrough.

Deployment

For now, its running at my home "server", exposed to the internet under my own personal domain. It's quite basic, but it gets the job done, I'd call it a beta version. With some hope, we'll be allowed to run it at school for better uptime, and maybe even a school provided sub-domain!

Deployment Automation

Even with such a simple deployment, some stuff has already been automated. There's automatic build and deployment on every push onto the master repo. Note that development and testing is typicaly done on a separate branch.

Not only has this saved countless minutes of my life, it allows easy rollbacks from anywhere at any time. Simply rollback the commit and the server will deploy the changes automatically.

The Blog

We plan to write blog posts with our progress. Whenever we have news, you'll be able to find it there. I've taken quite a while to make them accessible to write and edit for everyone on the team.

The posts will include explanations of what's being worked on, who is doing what and some pictures or other showcases. This, besides being amazing for record-keeping and memories down the line, will keep us in check throughout the project.

The Main Page

While for now quite basic, its the start of almost every visit, so I did my best to keep it simple and elegant. Developed for mobile first, the design is adaptive enough and gives a very general, basic overview of our project. There's also a Get in touch form, secured by cloudflare turnstile. This has the added benefit of giving us some bare bones analytics at now extra cost.

- Francisco Lima