Welcome to devillers.nl v3!

Today I am launching the third iteration of my personal website at devillers.nl, the results of which you're looking at right now!

Why? While the previous iteration was great, it was also starting to become a little dated:

• The photo of me on the frontpage was more than a decade old (I still have a reasonable amount of hair in that picture)
• My freelance software company in the Netherlands no longer exists (just like my hairline)
• It said I am in Amsterdam, while actually I live on the other side of the planet
• Lots of frivolous design elements and fluff that no longer fit modern design principles
• The tech-stack Ruby+Jekyll was cool back in 2014 but nowadays deprecated
• Spotty responsiveness (I originally created it desktop first and then later hacked added responsiveness)
• Super cool integrations with Twitter, Flickr and more -- that all showed empty feeds since I haven't used any of these services in years

As you can read, it was well overdue for an overhaul!

For posterity, below a full-page screenshot of the previous iteration:

Out with the old, in with the new!

In this third redesign, I shifted the focus on design, content and technology in the following ways:

Minamilism

I want to focus on what I do as an engineer, both professionally and as a hobby. Everything on this website should support that narrative. Design elements should be kept to a minimum to avoid distractions.

Typography-first

Text is the primary design element of this iteration. It is how I best express myself and by using modern fonts I can quickly create a design that looks attractive. In doing so, this new iteration looks and feels like a novel. You can print the whole thing to paper, read it front-to-back and be left with a solid sense of what it is that I do as a software engineer.

Photography-second

To avoid "walls of text" I break up content with apealing and relevant imagery. In contrast to the previous two iterations, I have broken away from my mantra that all imagery should be authentic. Instead, this time I mixed my own images with those from third-party sources. In the end, I am not a professional photographer nor a talented illustrator, but I do want the imagery that I use on this website to look professional and again: support the narrative.

Engineering-focused

I am a software engineer and my website should be a reflection of that. The majority of pages now contain code and I make sure that this code is presented in an attractive way.

Modern

It is 2022 so I built this with 2022-grade features:

• Full responsiveness
• Optimized for Retina
• Dark mode
• Trackingless analytics

I implemented these features using 2022 tech:

• React
• TypeScript
• NextJS
• Chakra
• MDX (JSX-in-Markdown)
• Vercel

Inspired by

Since I am not a seasoned designer I rely on standard design systems to create an attractive design. The base design is a combination of Chakra's default theme, some adapted components from Chakra Templates and several components I had to create from scratch.

For the rest I draw my inspiration from other developers:

• Christian Hughes
• Lennart Jörgens aka LekoArts
• Stefan Natter
• Monica Lent

I hope you will enjoy this new iteration of my website. I certainly enjoyed creating it!