It’s funny coming back after years and seeing how you’ve changed, and how you’re still the same.

The last time I had a website was when I first learnt about HTML and CSS - nearly five years ago now. It was a hell of a time, that. I’d not long had my first job as a server and network engineer, but I got a wholesale introduction to the entire world of IT, networks, small business, software development, devops. It was great.

Anyway, the website. It was awful! it was raw HTML and CSS for everything, and it wasn’t a small website!

It had a lyrics page so I could remember the lyrics when I was playing along to Ruth ’s music, it had just nice pictures I liked? I think? It even had CI!

It took me a very long time to make, and at the time I couldn’t really put my finger on why. I knew I found it immensely frustrating but it’s only with coming back that I can see what was going on.

I lost that website after I moved house (and had to tear down my homelab ), and I didn’t try to make another until late last year. I made the same mistake this time as I did all those years ago; both times I didn’t start with a static site generator and a pre-built theme because I wanted to prove I could write the HTML/CSS from scratch. Difference is that this time I wanted the site to be a bastion of good coding practises. My requirements were:

Uses HTML5 wherever possible. Mobile-first, responsive design. Interactive-ready.

I’d heard Next.JS was a cool platform, so I started with that. I think I had a bit of that dunning-kruger confidence and I spent maybe 3 days playing with the example site before I understood that not only was I out of my depth, I was actually in the wrong pond. So I confessed my mistake to my colleagues and had a look through other frameworks available. I did time with SemanticUI, but couldn’t figure out how to even install it, never mind build a website with it! I eventually landed on PureCSS.

It took me a while but I got quite far with this one. I was quite picky about what I wanted, and I needed to extend the classes so much that in the end I gave up and just wrote the whole thing in html and CSS again. And I did. And it looked like absolute arse, but it worked! It was responsive, it rendered properly on mobile and it used HTML5 components.

But it wasn’t going to be a good advert for me as a professional, so… I installed hugo and found a very nice theme and that’s what you’re looking at now.

So what have I learned? I learned that I did not do the due diligence to decide why I actually wanted a website. the actual reason is that I wanted to be able to write things like this, to provide an entrypoint into my professional life and to attach my CV to. I got caught up with wanting to feel like I could do front-end dev and I overestimated how much time I would want to invest in this project.

I guess really what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t pay to skip the “Why” part of a project. If there’s a natural order to different projects, then beware of getting blocked on a small point at the start. And most of all, don’t ever try to build a website from scratch again because frontend dev SUCKS.