(Old) Website

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is about my old website, not the one you’re reading this on. See the post about this new website here. Just keeping this post for posterity, I don’t have the old site hosted anywhere and don’t plan to change that.

Here is what it looked like:

end editor’s note]

I built this website to learn more (or, well, anything) about web dev, to get nice shiny custom portfolio and resume pages, and to have a place to document my projects where I can easily show them to other people. After two months of working on it on and off, all three were accomplished!

I built it from raw materials, aka HTML, CSS, and JS. I had never worked with any of them before. JS was a breeze after I somewhat figured out the syntax, HTML was harder, and I still have a minimal understanding of CSS. But I recently started using TailwindCSS which seems like it’s going to remove any need to learn the gritty parts of CSS. It’s sped me up a lot!

Anothing thing that’s sped me up has been making a conscious effort to utilize LLMs. I already knew they were a fantastic learning tool, but in developing this website and other recent projects (especially code), it’s been hammered into me just how much they can accelerate the learning process if you use them correctly (i.e. make sure you have at least some understanding of what you’re copy-pasting).

I’m using as much JS html generation as possible. Everything that changes on the portfolio page is generated from JS. Eventually I’m going to template/wrap every project post in something modular, right now the headers, page layout, etc are not modular (the buttons on the left are, though).

If I was building a website with a deadline or product in mind, I would obviously do things differently, but I strongly believe that building from nothing and gradually using more tools as you realize that you need them is the best way to teach yourself things.

It’s not winning any design awards any time soon but I’m happy with it and it taught me a lot. And of course there’s still many things to modify and features to add (besides specific pages/projects I want to build), which I’ll be doing whenever I feel like it. I’m especially proud of the portfolio page that you just came from, I think it turned out quite well.

Web dev is pretty fun. One thing I like about all software is how short the iteration time is, and I feel like that’s taken to an extreme when I can ctrl-s, alt-tab, and immediately see the results of my work. It’s fun! I’m starting to learn React and excited to build some more involved stuff with it.

Go to the site directory to see every page I’ve made so far. Right now there’s not a ton besides the resume, portfolio, and two purposefully bad pages I made for fun that are each an inside joke brought to life.