Hard Lessons Learned: My Portfolio Site Rebuild and What's Next Hi! Here's my updated site after some significant changes and hard-earned lessons as a junior developer building in production.

The Update Journey Very small changes happened in the backend, not much going on there. The big changes were to the frontend and HTML. Frontend design is an art form and I still need to work on my JavaScript, CSS, and HTML skills. The frontend now uses a free package theme, and I was able to modify the links to get page transitions working smoothly.

The Costly Mistake This being my first ongoing production project, I lost some of my previous blog posts because I forgot to back up before I began my update - a hard lesson learned. As any developer will tell you, this mistake happens once and never again.

Solutions Implemented I now have snapshots in place and I'm saving the database to a bucket in S3. Live and learn. These backup strategies are now bulletproof, ensuring I never lose work again.

What's Next I now need to continue testing the site functionality, and I plan on making this site truly full-stack by adding either Angular or React to the frontend and problem-solving those integration challenges.

Building a portfolio while learning has taught me that mistakes in production are expensive but invaluable learning experiences. Each challenge makes me a better developer.