Go | Tailwind CSS | TypeScript | Mobile | JavaScript | PWA Vidya 33 1/3 July 25, 2021

Neil Chaudhuri (He/Him)

LinkedIn

Welcome to the third iteration of the Vidya website! Thank you for checking it out.

At Vidya we pride ourselves on embracing emerging technologies and helping our clients leverage them to realize their potential. This website proves we practice what we preach. The first version of the website was built in Ruby with a tool called Octopress. The next version was built with Hugo, a stunningly fast static-site generator built on Google’s popular Go programming language.

This version is built in React, the most popular JavaScript library in the world, using Next.js, one of the most popular React frameworks in the world and the building block for full-stack “meta” frameworks like RedwoodJS and Blitz. The user interface itself is crafted with the ever popular Tailwind CSS.

Even with the migration from Hugo to Next.js, the site remains a Progressive Web Application. We described what that is before, but essentially a PWA uses web technologies to provide a native mobile-like experience. And I don’t mean simply a responsive UI, but also caching for offline usability, a home screen icon, and other niceties we usually only expect from native mobile apps written in Kotlin, Swift, Flutter, or React Native.

What’s New?

The PWA thing is still cool, but the new Vidya website offers a couple of interesting new features.

First, the site supports Dark Mode. It defaults to your system settings if you haven’t defined a preference for the site itself. Check it out by clicking the moon, or the sun, at the top of the page.

The other interesting feature arises from the fact we are a Brave Certified Creator. You can think of Brave as Chrome without the creepiness. Created by Brandon Eich, the author of JavaScript, Brave blocks trackers and ads, which improves your privacy and also increases performance since all that junk consumes a lot of bandwidth and memory. Brave also offers Tor for the most secure browsing experience you can find.

As a Brave user, you have the opportunity to earn rewards in the form of cryptocurrency called BAT for your browsing, and in turn, you can redeem BAT for yourself and reward content creators with BAT if you find their content valuable.

That includes us.

Since we are a Brave Verified Creator for this site, our Twitter page, and our YouTube page, you can reward us with some BAT if you find our content valuable. It’s a win-win.

We are excited to combine powerful emerging technologies like Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and Brave to bring you a better experience on the Vidya website. Please check it out and let us know what you think.