I’ve resisted blogging for years because there are so many of us out there doing it, but after getting laid off at the beginning of September I found myself wanting to document things I was learning for my job search.

So another blog is born.

But how to do it? 🤔

I had a few things I knew I wanted to do:

• use a headless CMS
• use Next.js
• use Tailwind CSS
• allow for pretty easy integration with my existing portfolio site infrastructure (static hosting through AWS S3, CloudFront and Route 53)

At my last company, we used Strapi as our headless CMS so I initially checked that out since I had some existing familiarity with it, but, it didn’t feel quite right. I don’t expect this blog of mine to get tons of traffic so getting the infrastructure set up for Strapi to host it myself felt like a big lift and their cloud hosting is kinda spendy for just a hobby blog.

Off to google I went and ran across some mentions of Sanity and started looking at their docs and decided to give it a whirl.

So here you are. On my blog using Sanity, Next.js, Tailwind and hosted on Vercel but redirected through to my AWS infrastructure.

How did I get it started?

Thanks for asking, I’d love to tell you.

For the most part, I’ve been pretty satisfied with Sanity’s documentation but I’m a visual learner so I went over to YouTube and found a tutorial that I followed for getting my initial set up going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqmzrQ1MNG8

I followed this video closely to get up and running so I’m not going to go in to much detail yet, but my blog looked pretty much like that one at the end of this video only saying Sarah’s Blog instead and filled with hipster ipsum.

The only big difference is I then had mine redirect to blog.sarahdoes.tech using this medium article as a reference.

I hope you’ll follow along as I continue to make improvements.

Next up:

• customizing it to match my portfolio
• adding stylized code component 💅🏻
• adding tags 🏷️
• making more intuitive images 📸
• integrating the sanity studio and customizing it