Why?

I wanted to make a website, where I can show off some of the stuff I make. So I decided to take it as a learning opportunity and use frameworks that I'm not familiar with.
So I stumbled upon the usual suspects like Bootstrap and React, but I wasn't satisfied. Until I found Next.js, which sounded very interesting and not as complicated as React alone.
As backend I decided to use Strapi.io, a headless CMS.

How did it go?

It was quite a challenge. I never used node.js, had only very basic knowledge of Javascript, but Next.js made it a bit easier, by giving you a ready to go base you can build upon. Don't get me wrong, it was still a challenge, but seeing that even really big websites use it kept me motivated.

Design

Tailwindcss is really nice. It makes styling the website a lot faster. It might not be that pretty; But you get the styling done, FAST.
But what was my design concept? I didn't really have one. Most modern websites are so clean, sometimes boring: flat, nice harmonizing colours.
But I build prototypes and experiment. So I chose neon yellow as my primary colour. And to make it pop, different then most websites, I use it in contrast with black.

Backend

As mentioned, I use Strapi.io as my backend. It's a headless CMS, easy to set up and also easy to use. It provides a webinterface to add and edit content. As an example, this text is written in Markdown, which gets pulled from the CMS through an API from next.js, which rerenders it on the server on the next request.
Everything runs in a Docker container, changes to the code get synchronized through a simple git push to my server, which then automatically rebuilds everything and serves it.