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I spent a fair chunk of time during February and March playing at being a web designer, not developer but designer. Like a proper one I was even learning how to use Figma!

Recently I've been getting a website ready to launch. Most of the website was built quite some time ago and just needed some finishing touches, some design tweaks in the colour themes and tightening up of the look and feel of the site. There were also a few infrastructure decisions needed to be made, but for all intents and purposes it was almost ready to go.  

But what's that famous quote I'm thinking of? Oh yeah from the [Ninety-ninety rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule)

> The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

I really liked the site as it was but I just couldn't quite make everything work together so I went back to the drawing board and started to try out completely new landing page designs. I became obsessed and iterated and iterated until I came up the a design that I thought finally looked sweet. I then turned this into a working website using just an `index.html` file and a couple of `.css` files. 

Once I reached this point I started to think about some of the components on the website that will capture users input. Things like the `<ContactForm>` for example. Remember I said I had some infrastructure decisions to make? Well that was things like 

* Where do I host this website when built?
* Which data store options are available to me?
* Which language should I build the API with?

So that's when I started to look around and not just do things the way I might usually which would be:

* Host on AWS
* Store data in DynamoDb
* Write API in .NET Core

I decided to take the opportunity to evaluate some new ~~toys~~ technologies.

I ended up using the T3 Stack. Which included the following technologies:

* TypeScript
* tRPC
* Tailwind CSS
* React
* NextJS
* Prisma
* Zod

I wrote a couple of blog posts [1](/blog/post/contact-form-planet-scale/), [2](/blog/post/tailwind/) as I went and I fell in love with this stack. The developer experience of using tRPC, Zod and TypeScript is *chefs kiss*. Tailwind CSS blew my mind. I took that `index.html` and couple of `.css` files and I completely replicated it in a full T3 Stack, React and NextJS project. It has forever changed the way I will approach styling my web apps in the future. Bye bye `styled-components`. Hello `Tailwind CSS`.

So what did I achieve this month whilst all that was going on? 

* Learned how to use Figma
* Nailed a new Landing Page design
* Learned a new technology stack - T3
* Learned a new website styling technique with Tailwind and it's utility class approach
* I published articles on
    * Revisiting WARP
    * UFC 268
    * Building a `<ContactForm>` component with T3
    * Styling websites with `styled-components` VS `Tailwind CSS`
* I configured a new public GitHub account for sample project source code to accompany blog posts
* I also hit 3 full months of not drinking! 

Overall March was a pretty incredible month. I've really got the coding bug again at the moment and I'm enjoying building things more than I have in a long time.

Let's see what April brings!

BRAGGADOCIOUS BLOG! - MAR

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