A new coat of paint

A while back I decided to make a website. As someone who really only did systems type programming, I was at a loss of where to start for what it took to build a site in then-2023. At the time, my friend recommended that I use a static site generator called Gatsby, because it was really popular. So I did, prodding at some portfolio template, slightly tweaking where I didn’t like it. Gatsby had this system called “shadowing”, where, if you made a file in the same path as a file in a package, it would use yours instead. It was incredibly buggy, and caused me much strife. Somewhere on the SIGPwny Discord there is a photo of me curled in a ball because of the pain Gatsby inflicted on me.

Sure enough, a year later, Gatsby died, and my friend moved on to Astro. By now, I was only really programming in C++ for research, or just doing theory. I still used Python & HTML for the work I was doing for TheorieLearn, but I really didn’t consider myself that much of a web developer. I knew at some point I wanted to rewrite the site in Astro, because now I trusted my friend with this new framework (surely it will not die). Between then I did make other sites in Astro, I just didn’t know what I wanted to do for my own site.

I’m OK with how it looks like right now, it’s pretty boring all things considered. My old website was a stripped down version of this template, I think this one is even more minimal. The more interesting part is that I didn’t write most of the components or styling, I finally caved and let Antigravity do it for me. I think this is about the only use case I will ever trust it with on my own time. I don’t trust AI to write software I deem critical, and I don’t trust AI to write research code. Making a portfolio site based off of the long, long history of portfolio sites ever written? Sure. But this comes with the caveat that I didn’t learn anything from the production of this site. If something looked wrong I just asked Google (literally) to fix it. Sure I saw the changes going in, but I’m not going to remember what changes fixed what bugs 3 months from now.

There’s other software I enjoy writing. I haven’t really found that joy in web development, so I guess I’m OK turning what would’ve been a 3 week long project (for me) into a day. I think if I design a site on paper, I’m going to try very hard to implement it myself as much as possible, but I needed a coat of primer, first. The website looks new, and I’m deploying it with a new framework, so it must be new.