Hello! 👋🏻

I'm Aaron, a Brit living in Newcastle-upon-tyne, UK. I work professionally as a Software Engineer, and study languages, history and philosophy in my spare time.

I current work as a Lead Consultant at Hippo Digital, working on public sector project for the Department of Education. You can find out more about my work history on my CV.

Tech I Like

  • Web Development: I primarily use Node.js with TypeScript (or JavaScript for smaller projects) alongside Next.js to build websites and applications.
  • Scripting: My preferred scripting languages are Python and JavaScript, as I'm well-versed in them and they offer extensive libraries that typically cover my needs.
  • API and Backend Development: For more robust API or backend architecture, I often choose .NET Core with C# and ASP.NET. The strongly-typed nature of C# and the structured framework of ASP.NET help maintain clean and organised code.
  • Cloud Hosting: When possible, I opt for hosting on a DigitalOcean droplet. If more extensive cloud services are required, I usually opt for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which I find more user-friendly than Azure or AWS. I also self-host services on shared server hosting running Ubuntu Server, typically with Hetzner.

Where to find me

  • Letterboxd is a social platform for film lovers to rate, review, and discover movies, akin to "Goodreads for film."
  • GitHub is a web-based platform for version control and collaboration on software development projects. Find out what I've been working on here!
  • LinkedIn, unfortunately. A social network for professionals.

About this site

www.aaronjy.me is a static site (i.e. a bunch of HTML, JS, CSS and image files) written in JavaScript using Next.js. Tacit is being used as a micro CSS framework, and various smaller bits of custom CSS have been applied on top.

The site is hosted inside a Google Cloud Storage bucket with a load balancer sat in front of it. The load balancer is required as Cloud Storage doesn't support a) custom domains, b) HTTPS out of the box or c) a global CDN solution.

One of the biggest benefits of a website made of simple static files and assets is that I can deploy it easily, almost anywhere, and for very little money.