Welcome to Pedal Powered Dev, the new homepage/blog where I plan to write about my journey in game dev, cycling, and random things worth documenting in life.

Every now and then, I get the itch to revamp my personal site - mostly because tinkering and personalizing stuff is so much fun! It's also a great chance to try out new frameworks and stay up with what's hot in the frontend world. I had lots of fun putting together the previous version of the site @ v1.yian.dev. Cools as it is, with neon lights and an auto-typing terminal effect, it was not the best format to host blog posts and other contents.

With this revision, I decided to go with a monotonic color palette and minimalist design, inspired by the art styles in the game Firewatch (cover image above). Tools like UI Colors made it super easy to generate a set a coherent and beautiful colors to use from any base color you choose. Going with tailwind CSS is also another major departure from how I was used to styling with CSS and a breath of fresh air. Not having to jump between CSS files and your react components is a bliss so far. The mobile-first approach definitely took me some time to get used to and introduced headaches at first, but it really helped me make this site responsive from day 0 rather than building in responsiveness as an after thought.

This marks the v2.0 debut of yian.dev, and I'm super excited about the journey ahead. Pedal on. (Curtesy of Google Gemini)