New Year, New Site

I’ve tried and failed to build a website I love enough to share with the world probably four or five times until this past week. I realized I have no excuses anymore; in the last year I have come across new tools and gained enough terminal/code editor experience to overcome my fears and create something fun to house my thoughts, musings, contact info, and photos while also giving myself a fun and practical project to work on and iterate on.

This really started when I was stumbled across some really cool sites on reddit.com/r/webdev or through AI-related avenues. Sites like https://www.lysonober.com/ or https://www.ericwu.me/ inspired me to get my s*&t together and shit down until I learn enough to get a site running that feels good enough to host my resume on.

Throughout my search, I’ve also been learning more and more about AI tools and their coding capabilties. Claude and ChatGPT have been used in simple applications in the past, but the true unlocks that helped me accelerate my process were the combination of Bolt and Cursor AI . These tools helped me visualize and understand every mistake made along the way and continuously improve every detail, from the hover functionality to the filter nav-bar, light and dark mode implementations, blog page formatting, and the subtle-but-necessary animations on the draggable bento grid.

This blog post will highlight a few features of the site as well as the usage of AI and iterative prompting to get to a desired result. It was super fun to play with, so I hope this can inspire you to dust off the idea you’ve been sitting on for a while.