← Thoughts

Yet Another Website Redesign

After about 5-ish years, I decided to redesign my website - again. A brief history is in order, I think:

2016 - As a freshman in college, a class tells me that I have to attend the fall career fair, bring a resume, and have a personal website ready-to-go for it. I learn that GitHub Pages is a free option and think it would be cool to make my website from scratch, learning HTML as I go. I follow the grading rubric about required pages word for word. I have never heard of Javascript, frameworks, or templates.

It was, needless to say, a masterpiece:
2020 - By my final semester, I've had a few internships and club projects under my belt, including a fresh stint making internal tooling pages with Vue. For my last career fair, I decide to rewrite my site in Vue to be more maintainable, and to redesign it as a single-page site while I'm at it.

It was, needless to say, a masterpiece:
2023 - Whilst a working backend dev who's barely touched HTML in years, I see that Svelte is at the top of all the Stack Overflow polls, and decide I want to give it a try by porting my existing website to it (without other changes). This is simultaneously really frustrating (getting the 3-year old Vue build working after I foolishly updated all dependencies took days, SvelteKit added a bunch of frameworky stuff I didn't expect, etc.) and boringly easy (after all the setup, the Vue and Svelte component structure was nearly identical, and porting my pages was straightforward).

I finish the update, then promptly don't use it and lose it (i.e. all my Svelte knowledge).

So why, 2 years later, am I updating my site - with, needless to say, another masterpiece?

The main reasons: I wanted my website to be more personal (and less "please give me a job" focused), inspiration from the "small web" community struck, and I was thinking of - very occasionally - blogging.

These reasons are related, but the 2nd one is what actually got me to do something. I was reading Parimal Satyal's Rediscovering the Small Web (there is, apparently, a whole genre of "make the internet fun again" blogs), and the idea of making a small website - just plain HTML and CSS, no frameworks to learn or keep updated - seemed really fun to me. No keeping up with the frameworks! Your own small space to be weird!

This also jibed with my feeling that this website wasn't really representative of me, personally, anymore, despite being a "personal website." I had created it to get a job in my early twenties, and I wanted it to be more generally "Jake's website", rather than "Jake's really-would-like-to-be-employed website." It felt awkward to have my site structure still follow a campus career center rubric from almost a decade ago, and to me the old site's tone felt like I was trying too hard to be liked - which, y'know, I was. I'd been mildly uncomfortable with that for awhile, but not enough to do anything about it other than feel more-than-usually awkward when sharing the link. Satyal's "just write something in HTML, screw the frameworks" call finally pushed me over the edge - or lowered the activation energy - some metaphor like that.

Oh, and blogging. This was a smaller reason, one tied into the personalization motive, and one I waffled on. The Internet has enough opinions out there already, by people smarter and wiser than me - what do I have to add besides noise? Isn't it vain to throw your thoughts out, expecting to be read? But, for now, I've decided go for it, for several reasons:

Multiple people I've read and/or know say they blog to refine their own thoughts in writing, which seems worthwhile to me - a chance to practice writing, and a chance to think better.
I expect no one but IRL friends (and the occasional Russian bot) to read this - which is good, actually. It takes the pressure off, and means I don't have to worry (as much) about posting out of pride.
It seems like a nice opportunity to share ideas with friends, and get feedback on them.
It's a place for me to record my own thoughts for reference later.
I was convinced you don't have to be original on the Internet to be helpful.

Ironically, design-wise I've ended up going with a kinda-generic minimalist vibe, despite the small-web inspiration. That came out of a combination of me wanting to minimize page size (but not as much as Dan Luu), having no artistic talent, and actually (sigh) liking minimalist designs, despite them being everywhere these days. I've also always appreciated readability, and really liked Steph Ango's Flexoki theme, so I shamelessly copied from him.

So, that's it - welcome to the new site. May it live long and prosper, or, failing that, be a stepping stone on to greater things.