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The Bytewise Site

Bytewise has been rebuilt several times. Over the years, the site has gone through different tech stacks, migrated across cloud providers, even the purpose and content type has changed over time.

The site was originally built with the intent to provide I.T. support as an individual contractor, it was the first web application I have ever built and deployed myself. Although I ended up straying from I.T. support roles, the site remains an important part of my career as a professional software developer.

Current purpose

Bytewise is currently being used as a place to record my own thoughts, or build out my own documentation about my personal equipment and services. Most of the content revolves around my homelab, or general software development experiences.

The main goal of the site is to keep me engaged with various types of technology, pushing me to continue learning.

Tech Stack

Application

I wanted to keep things simple, so I chose to go with a NextJS application. I didn't want to deal with a backend or CMS, it adds unwanted complexity and additional software that needs to be maintained. One app is much easier to deal with, and NextJS server-side functionality supported my needs.

Content

The main pages of the site are done in static HTML, however, the blog pages needed to be a bit more dynamic and friendly to edit. The simplest solution was to go with markdown to express all of my content. Markdown is easy to read and write, and provides all of the desired functionality for writing styled content.

NextJS has been configured to collect all of the articles on the server-side and provide them to the client-side for rendering. I'm able to supply metadata for my markdown files, which allow me to provide extra rendering context, control SEO related metadata, and even support filtering.