What's Next Here?

This post is just a listing of some of the things I'm planning to add here in the coming days.

Content

Front Page

That front page is pretty spare, hey? Right now it's just the default Docusaurus page with all their branding stripped out. I've got to decide what I'm going to put there. It's a lot of real estate to fill.

Footer

I've got some idea what I want to do here, at least. I'll have to include my linked-in social card at a minimum. Will probably also put up a GitHub card of some kind, and my CodeWars badge. Not sure what all yet. I'll have some time to think about it

Pages

Bio

Need a bio page for sure. I'm anticipating just regurgitation my LinkedIn bio, but I may add some additional sub-pages to share a little bit about me outside of my working persona. Haven't decided yet if that's A) appropriate and B) work I want to do

Projects

Technically there's a projects page now, but there's not much on it. Ultimately, this page was the root cause for creating this whole website, but then I kind of stopped working on projects to create this website. This website BECAME the project. There will be a page for this there soon, at least.

Kata

I figure if I'm doing these kata to keep my language fluency up, maybe they'll be useful as a demo too. Show a potential employer that I can write nice tidy code. I also have a notion to include a section for Design kata, which I'm new to. They seem less structured and less easy to share out in a regular format, but maybe that's good. Anyway, looking forward to putting something up here.

Support

I don't think anyone's likely to need support from me yet. But I do hope eventually somebody might want to use some of the custom components I'm working on. I've been organizaing my personal work in Jira, so I'll include a widget here to submit requests. I don't think I'm ambitious enough to include a Slack interface, but we'll see how I feel when I start in.

Infrastructure

Process

Probably about time I protected my main branch and stopped pushing directly to it. PRs, from now on. Oh! And I need to make my repository public, so I can share it on the Projects page.

Tests!

I've had a couple of abortive attempts to introduce Jest and use my Storybook stories as the basis for the first tests. So far that hasn't worked out so well. Mostly it's had to do with imports. Both Docusaurus and Storybook rely on a lot of preprocessing, and getting Jest configured to keep step with them has been a bit of a headache. I was actually on the verge of abandoning Storybook altogether, but I've decided it still serves nicely as a showcase, and home for the individual components's documentation. Solving that SVG issue I mentioned in a previous blog post helped too.

I also want to use this as a chance to explore Playwright. I've used it only very briefly before when I contributed to someone else's project that was using it. I like Cypress a lot, but I definitely prefer Playwright in one regard: it lets you use standard JavaScript idioms, where Cypress traps you in their very a-typical world that is similar to working with Promises, but predates promises, so it has it's own idioms that require learning.

Last, I think I'll probably explore what Storybook can do for me as a test platform all by itself (in the absence of Jest).

Refactoring

My Logo Storybook stories are looking about how I want them, but there's a lot of boilerplate in the story definition file to make that happen. I think I may extract that all out to a component just for the sake of tidiness.

Fixes

By default, Docusaurus uses a token that looks like this:

<!-- truncate -->

to indicate where a blog post should be truncated when you're viewing it as part of a list of all posts. Unfortunately, that breaks the Visual Studio MDX parser quite badly. The code still compiles and displays just fine, but Visual Studio shouts at me that the whole file after that point is riddled with errors, which is distracting, and bad, and potentially hides other problems I should know about.

I discovered there's a mechanism to redefine that token in the docusaurus config file, so I've changed it to TRUNCATE_HERE, which is working beautifully, except that it still shows up in the document content now, which is not a great look.

So I'll have to figure out some way of masking that from the displayed content that isn't an XML comment. Maybe I can wrap it in a <div> and use CSS to hide it? That's a lot of text to type for every blog post though. Will have to create a snippet. Anyway, it's worth exploring.

Automation

I'm currently using the provided docusaurus deploy command to push my built site to GitHub Pages. Sometime in the next week or two, I want to get that changed over to a GitHub actions flow, so that the definitions in my main branch and the published site are in sync. In that build, I also plan to:

• run tests
• publish a test/coverage report to the website
• migrate the global docusaurus styles for Storybook

I'm sure I'm probably forgetting something either that's already in my Jira or that I've thought of while working on something else and forgot to write down. I'm sure eventually something will prompt my memory.