On building my personal website
The why
My old personal website sucked. It was cluttered, nonsensical and also had next to no content on it. I'm planning on spending a lot more time on personal projects this year and I wanted a place to showcase them. I also wanted to start writing more, so I needed a blog. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone and build a new personal website.
The how
Here's the stack I used:
- Next.js for the frontend
- Tailwind CSS for styling
- MDX for the blog
- Vercel for hosting
- v0 for easily designing custom components and helping with styling
- shadcn for base components and themeing
It's a very modern stack, which I went for on purpose because I'm trying to get better at all of the tools I deployed here.
The style heist
Now I'm a dev, not a designer so I don't really plan out the design of the sites before I build, I just put them together. Which makes for quick building, but it also means I struggle to end on a design that feels coherent and that I really like. So I decided not to re-invent the wheel and leaned on some of the best devs out there for inspiration, in particular Lee Robinson and Dario Amodei's personal website were huge inspirations for the design of mine. I loved the minimalism, simplicity and cleanliness of their sites and I tried to emulate that in mine. I know a lot of devs go all out with their personal sites to impress others, but I think I'd prefer to keep mine clear and concise and let my projects speak for themselves.
Hopefully this will be the last redesign for a little while and I can focus on building some cool projects to showcase on here.