Admission time -- front end development scares me and makes me feel like an imposter.

It's not like I haven't done it before, in my first "real" internship at StackVelocity I was tasked with building a web application to streamline an internal process. For that I used the MEAN stack -- Mongo, ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS. In college I built the website for UCSB Dhadkan (philanthropy club) and later for my CS Capstone Project. These all used different frameworks / tools which I was able to pick up. Still though, I've never been the artistic type, which combined with my tendency to be a perfectionist, has led to a lot of frustration. I know component libraries exist, but it never felt natural -- I just didn't 'get it' like others seem to do. As such, in my career I tended toward back-end development.

For this blog, I decided to jump in but still keep it simple; I used this as a means to finally learn React. Some quick research led me to Next.js, which also hosted a very thorough tutorial on how react works, how to build with Next, and deploy on Vercel. In May I had the opportunity to attend Stripe Session where I sat in on a panel discussion with Lee Robinson, VP of Product at Vercel, who discussed v0: a chatbot capable of generating UI. I immediately went home that night and tried it -- boom, I had the minimalist post-forward blog structure to play around with.

TL;DR Using Next.js, hosting on Vercel, front-end generated by Vercel's v0.