How I built this website

The year is 2025 and there is no shortage of tools and frameworks to build websites. However, there is something that I find myself missing - creating a simple website from scratch using plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Seriously, remember the days of firing up sublime text, writing some html and css, maybe sprinkle in js for funsies? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. The first world problem with that approach though, is you can’t really share templates and have to keep repeating yourself a bunch of times. Ironically one of the first things we learn about in programming is the importance of DRY.

So after doing some research, I found Astro which is kind of like a middle ground between the old school days and something like Next.js. What’s really cool though, is its a BYO-anything - you can use whatever front-end technology stack you want and are not locked into a specific one. That’s always been annoying for my personal site because i’ll often let it sit for a while and then come back to it and be like oh, yeah I built this on nuxt, but I don’t really use vue anymore, and how does the first version of tailwind work again?.

Anyways, that’s how I built this website. I’m bringing back those 2015 vibes where everything web development was a little more simple and fun. I’m starting from a blank slate and will be adding more features and tweaking things as I go.