Aikenwx.co

Aikenwx.co is my personal website where I can share about my work and experience as well as my hobbies and personal interests. To ensure that Aikenwx.co offers the best user experience, I made Aikenwx.co into a fully static and well-optimized website. It boasts high performance on Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed insights, achieving over 90 points performance scores for mobile and desktop devices for all pages, including pages with large, sizable images.

Currently, Aikenwx.co's frontend is hosted on Vercel and is built using Next.js and the Tailwind CSS framework. Next.js offered many out-of-the-box optimization tools for website development such as Static-Site Generation (SSG), Server-Side Rendering (SSR), and automatic resizing for static images and was perfect for my goal for creating highly optimized React Web Application. Furthermore, instead of relying on an external component library, I used Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework, along with some of my own custom CSS to design and build custom components to ensure minimal bundle size and faster load speeds for Aikenwx.co. Of course, I had some help and made use of Flowbite, a large Tailwind CSS template library to quickly build many of my components.

Aikenwx.co does also come with a backend, made up a relatively simple express.js application which queries a PostgreSQL database. One fun fact though, is that this entire backend is running entirely out of my tiny Raspberry Pi at home. For security, I have configured an Nginx reverse proxy on my Rasberry Pi to act as firewall to block any requests coming from anywhere other than Aikenwx.co IP address. In truth, I only need to run the backend during frontend build time since Aikenwx.co is entirely static, with no additional requests needed after build. As such, I usually do shut down the server after frontend deployment. However, I do plan to create additional features for Aikenwx.co in the future that could better make use of the backend, such as a gallery for all my digital artwork. So, if you are interested, do stay tuned! Meanwhile, if you interested in checking out the code on Aikenwx.co, you may so at https://github.com/aikenwx/Aikenwx.

Thanks for the read!