What is JSON-LD?

I was on the Train editing my portfolio wondering how I could optimise SEO, and stumbled across JSON-LD. Normally I see it used in the context of products so that google can pick up information from websites to then add it to their 'shopping' tab etc. I found that I can include it here though! My schema has defined 'Jake Mackie' as a person, so google should crawl me.. as weird as that sounds lol.

So I defined a person type that I can give to the schema.

export interface Person {
  "@context": string;
  "@type": string;
  name: string;
  description: string;
  birthDate: string;
}

...along with me.json to match those types I've defined.

{
  "name": "Jake Mackie",
  "description": "Jake Mackie is a 19-year-old apprentice fullstack developer for Hiyield based in Cornwall.",
  "birthDate": "2005-08-04"
}

Then, on a page we can use both to pass the valid JSON-LD data!

import { Person } from "app/types/personType";
import Me from "app/json/me.json";

const jsonLd: Person = {
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  ...Me,
};

So when the /about page gets indexed, the JSON-LD defines me as a person! This means that the search term 'Jake Mackie' when looking for JSON-LD data to match - should fine mine within this site, boosting my identity in SEO rankings.