I think this site is finally in a state where it can be put online. It took me a bit under two weeks. Most of that time was spent on things that don’t matter much when trying to get an MVP out, like CSS animations, optimizing first load times and iterating over design decisions.
At the beginning, I had an idea of one of those sleek one-page apps with hero images that scream that I’m a serious designer with a serious LinkedIn presence. The first version even had AJAX, and since it had AJAX, I figured I’d make a terminal interface that can switch the content, since I’ve seen cool kids having terminal themes in their websites lately. Well… with that idea, art started imitating life and suddenly the whole UI just resembled an IDE similar to the one I’ve spent the last 7 years staring at. To really nail it down, I automatically applied the monospaced Hack font (RIP Chris Simpkins) to the entire site and figured that would give it some character. After a brief moment of clarity I realized how robotic one’s brain gets when the only thing you focus on for years on end is engineering.
Nevertheless, the floodgates were open and I was free to express myself honestly like the noble savage I was. Naturally this meant making something that looked like a mid-2000s hackerman website mixed with a healthy dose of superfluous modern bloat. I got rid of AJAX, so this site works even with JavaScript disabled (I hate JS). However, for people who keep it enabled, it loads a completely frivolous terminal navigation. I figured I might do something fun with it in the future. Maybe port it to WebAssembly and make some small games for it or something.
At that point the engineering brain kicked into full gear and I started optimizing the first load of the page to be under 14kB. This is exactly the kind of thing that productive people loathe, but the moment we stop optimizing software is when all enjoyment disappears from the field. I wanted the page to include the CSS animation so it isn’t completely devoid of life, which meant that I had to gradually drop the size of the background image and finally get rid of the font Chris had gifted us. Hitting that 14kB target with compression isn’t exactly hard, but frankly as I’m writing this, I have no idea how large the first load actually is.
After I got out of that optimization phase I finally started tackling content pages, one at a time. Each took me approximately one day of iterating, testing with different resolutions, fixing bugs and adding things to them. As an example, I had no idea what I could put into the project page, since I’ve only been doing proprietary work and studying for ages now. At least the layout of it was quite clear. The same can’t be said about this blog page. When I got to this part I had no clue what I actually wanted to do with this. It looks extremely bare-bones even when compared to static markdown blog sites. I’m currently waiting to get inspired at some point in the future and make it prettier.
I also refactored the site to use Hugo. It’s a bit weird to first make a website and then start using a website builder, but the idea of being able to add the content as markdown files piqued my curiosity (along with the automatic minifying during build time).
Overall the experience was nice. I haven’t done webpages this way in what feels like forever (everyone just wants WordPress). Now I’m finally an internet landowner, so my crops can feed the insatiable maw of Moloch that is the modern LLMs.
- Asikaim