Colophon

This website has lived many lives at this point, ranging from my first attempts at front-end web development to hosting academic projects and piecing together a professional portfolio. Many were cut short or never even saw the light of day, and this likely won't be the last time cdalto.com is rebirthed or transformed.

Without the genius, creativity, and hard work of others, this site would be significantly harder to iterate over so quickly. I'm a firm believer in giving credit where it's due, especially to those who make my life and work easier. You have my gratitude. I'd like to take an opportunity for a few notable mentions. To those left unmentioned, you are no less valued. 🙏🏼

As of the time of this writing, this site was built with Next.js and hosted on Vercel, using Visual Studio Code. For years I used Jekyll and GitHub Pages, which still hold a special place in my heart. Jekyll was such a fun and approachable developer experience for its time, and deserves some recognition for the state of static site generation today. It walked so that the Jamstacks of today could run. With most of my day-to-day in React and TypeScript now, a framework like Next.js seemed like the logical choice to build and iterate quickly. And with Markdown support, the writing experience doesn't have to be so unfamiliar. To serve content more dynamically, I am migrating things slowly over to Sanity.

For the UI, I'm using Mantine for most of the components, styling, and interaction. I came across Mantine in the RedwoodJS docs while working on Amenity Bike, and I've been infatuated with it since! As someone who's built design systems in React and worked with much larger and complex systems, like Material UI, Mantine is such a breath of fresh air and delightful user experience. I gravitate towards it a lot now for personal and small projects.

The site's type is set in Catamaran with headings in PT Sans, both available from Google Fonts. I have a thing for slab and geometric sans-serif fonts that have a bit of character and quirk to them. As always, feel free to reach out with any readability or accessibility challenges you run into on this site. I value usability over aesthetic and am more than happy to accommodate.

Most of the images used on the site are a product of my own inspiration or iPhoneography. Many likely came from my past presence on Instagram, but they were likely edited with VSCO over the years. Otherwise, they probably came from Adobe Stock or Unsplash.

So it goes, there's always a few things here and there that need to be ironed out. Thankfully, W3C has some excellent tools to help me keep my code in check. It is also a personal mission of mine to maintain satisfactory PageSpeed Insights scores, but content comes first.