Published: May 19, 2024 by Josh Mazen
As a former web developer, I wince at the number of times I’ve had to create a website.
It should definitely be easier than I’ve made it. No joke, I have been trying to build a personal website for 6 goddamn years. I sometimes go back and see what I used to do, and while technically correct, it was so goddamn easy to shoot yourself in the foot with design decisions that wouldn’t stand the test of time.
In the year of our lord 2024, you might be asking yourself, “Joshy-chan, why did you not simply use Jekyll all along UwU?” Well you stupid idiot who makes a valid point
I WAS STUBBON
Maybe it was the fact that, after 2 years of essentially working as a web consultant and front-end code monkey, I finally had gotten my long-awaited chance to become what I thought I wanted: a full-stack software engineer. I had graduated from Fullstack Academy of Code (shoutout) 2, maybe 3 years earlier and I hadn’t sniffed a Node.js command professionally. So naturally, I decided, “hmm ya know what, let’s try creating essentially a blog for me to showcase my half-finished projects and terrible stand-up using Webpack and React. But it’s gotta be Preact because we gotta keep those bundle sizes small!”
People really do be forgetting how much of a pain in the ass web dev was before ChatGPT could make all of your debugging problems go away. Of course, leave it to an unseasoned kid straight out of bootcamp to make everything more difficult because he wanted to “showcase the newest technology.” Of course, I had a coworker mention that either Jekyll or Gatsby would have been smarter, but did I listen? NO. I wanted to show that old man (he was 31) that I KNEW BETTER. Of course, after figuring out that deploying this thing was going to be a nightmare, I discreetly switched to Gatsby in the middle of the night, to the shock and dismay of the 2 people that had ever seen my website before. Things were working, but it once again suffered from the problem of me refusing to use any sort of framework that made things more organized. Ultimately, I finally just said “L + ratio + Github pages + Jekyll + no server.” And here we are. Blog. Portfolio. Profit.
If you bothered to read all of this, I hope you learned the value of just doing the easy thing when you need something done quickly. Especially when it comes to getting yourself out there, it’s much easier to just find a template. Other people have suffered through this process so you don’t have to. After all, isn’t that what makes the world go around?
Anyway, I’ll hopefully use this website to showcase cool AI stuff that I’m working on as well as some personal projects. I’m getting married in 3 weeks, so once I get to start saying “Mah waif, vera naice wowee weewa”, I’ll start putting real content up here. In the meantime, here is the dog I’m babysitting today while I type this up.
