Perspective

Building my personal website

  • personal-site
  • workflow

After a few years of keeping journal entries and notes on my iPhone, I finally decided to make a personal website. I didn’t want to have a “personal brand” or a particularly marketable blog. Just a personal archive to write and keep a record of what I’m working on.

I was inspired by my friend’s blog (spateder.com). It took me a while to execute on this idea because I was unsure about

  1. cost
  2. commitment to a platform
  3. styling

The decreasing cost and increasing availabilty of AI tools and hosting solutions motivated me to create one.

My personal priorities for this website were:

  • A simple website, as few screens as possible
  • Posts would be written in Markdown. Thus, it’d be easy to draft, edit, and organize content
  • Simple, familiar UI
  • Easy to deploy. I wanted my hosting solution (Netlify) to automatically render, update, and deploy on commits to main. It’s great

My workflow to implement it was:

  1. Review a handful of personal sites for design inspiration
  2. Write a workplan with AI (and iterated with ChatGPT / Claude to refine it)
  3. Set up a git repo
  4. Pasted the workplan into the repo and asked Codex to build it
  5. Codex iterated, checked its work, and I gave small feedback along the way

I ended up with a simple site that does what I wanted. And, importantly, it felt fun to create it and write my first posts.

If you’re reading this, it worked! Thanks for visiting