Welcome To Comfort Cabinet
"A personal website project. Aiming to document aspects of my life, interests, and my past projects."
That's the first sentence of my README.md that's in the private repo for Comfort Cabinet. Forgive my casual prose throughout this post, I'm rushing this one out on New Year's Eve as an obligatory last commit of the year. These posts are supposed to be more of a stream of conciousness anyways. Welcome to the Journal blog category.
What's the Motive?
There are three main reasons for this website existing. I'm listing this like an elementary school essay introduction so bear with me.
I've denoted three P's:
- Passion
- Practice
- Portfolio
Passion
At the end of the day, I decided to be a front-end developer because I have a little creative sprit in me. I've been inspired by neocity pages and other personal labor of love blogs/sites to do my own thing. Having a goal to work toward in designing, creating up the site, and keeping it updated is driving me as I'm in job-hunt limbo. I'm going to document entries of how life's going, as well as more focused articles based on my hobbies/interests.
Practice
It's often suggested to make personal projects to boost up your resume, so I can get a job... truth nuke. Through making this website, I get some more needed time with using React, proper semantics, and working my design chops.
Portfolio
I'm proud of my past work and experiences that have helped me put knowledge into practice. I want a cool way to show this off aside from some linking some repos. How I'll advertise this will be for another day, but for now I'm doing this for me!
What's Going On Right Now
Now it's time for me to "lock in" as my generation is saying. Another semester of college has passed since I've graduated with my Bachelor's in CS but there is not any
work experience recorded on my resume. Truth be told, I haven't put my fullest efforts forward to filling job applications as I've been working on upping my resume through projects like these and studying for certifications.
As I've mentioned earlier, I hope with this initial release of this website I'll be more adamant on getting to the next benchmark in life. I'll still be updating the website of course, but I won't maintain my rule of
doing about 6 commits a week (one per day with a break on the weekend usually or other occasion).
The days I've been spending at my parents` home have been slow, almost like a lull period in my life, but it's been comfortable. I'm thankful of how patient my family is with me, but I don't want to waste
that goodwill. I've had plenty of rest — I mean this has been the most extended break I've ever had since starting school. I want to be able to be comfortable in life and with myself, and for me this means I have to
change the status quo I've got going on right now.
I guess if I had to make a New Year's resolution for 2026 it'd be pretty clear: Get a job as a software engineer. But onto the new year, the first thing on my mind is hanging out with my friends.
I've been neglecting some social interaction, so I think I'll treat this dosage of friendship very well and treasure my week-long excursion as motivation to keep on pushing forward. Then I'll come back refreshed
and ready to grapple the reality of my situation by the horns. I might even get a small job in the meantime to keep me busy, so as long as the reign of Comfort prevails!
Upcoming Updates
Anytime I'll make a major update to the website from this point forward, I'm going to create a categorized blog post; you'll be able to find these under the
Web Dev blog category. On that point of blog post updates, I plan to eventually incorporate a RSS feed for the blog posts. It seems to be a pretty common
feature for any blog site, but admittedly I've never had my hands on implementing it myself.
Another convention of blogs that I have yet to add is having a chapter list. Not only does it provide a better navigation experience and layout.
I already am using rehype-slug to generate headings, so creating a universal component to be used in every blog site should be relatively trivial.
From a design standpoint, it'll also stand to fill out empty space on bigger screens, and be able to be toggled on smaller screens.
That also isn't the end of it for blog posts. I'm just using markup here in this post, but by utilizing MDX, I'll be able to include custom components to my posts to add some interactivity.
Honestly, I've ran out of time to think of one to add here since I've been working on them for the other parts of Comfort Cabinet.
I want to eventually expand the Sound section of the website to include a history of past album selections whenever it gets updated. I've thought of other suggestions
like maybe a song of the week as a banner which would update more often and encourage users to check the page. An idea I've found novel among hobby sites is including a song
at the top of a blog entry that either fits the mood or was listened to while written. I think I would want to find my own twist on the idea, but that is to be brainstormed for the future!
The Elephant in the Room
One could argue leaving the Arcade section as part of the site navigation is misleading, but to me is part of the reason I wanted to make this site.
The "Cabinet" part of Comfort Cabinet's name comes from an arcade cabinet if some of the references and inspirations in the UI weren't too clear.
I want to eventually make some quick browser games as practice for me and for fun of the user. You can even see the first planned game I'll have if you look down at the footer section (My nephew has an obession with garbage trucks and cans).
At the very least, I've left an easter egg there if one wishes to navigate to it; also so I could call attention to my custom 404 page that'll make you say "That's rad".
It's definitely not because I didn't want to work around changing the visiblity of it.