Hello, again

Hi! If you're reading this, I'm in the process of building out this website. It's a little bit of an experiment for me (to be okay with sharing my work in an incomplete form) and it's also a wonderful way to announce to the world that I'm currently at the Recurse Center, from now till late March.

Back to basics

I've treated personal websites as kind of a way to set an "era" for me. My last website was a sleek portfolio I built with Next.js. It was very clean and professsional.

Except I never updated it! So, for this era, I decided to start writing my blog using the tools I've always known (since I was eleven): Writing HTML and CSS in an editor. There's no preprocessing, and this time not even a build system or a CI: I'm dragging and dropping files into Neocities like I used to in 2008.

This isn't really some sort of statement against build systems or anything, but rather a reset, a way to get myself back in the beginner's mindset. What is the actual "best" way for me to build software? How can I make myself most productive, in a way that works for me, not just what I "should" be doing?

Doing it live

I want to be okay with sharing my work in an incomplete form. It's a way for me to ward off that sense of perfectionism, which for me comes from a place of insecurity. I probably won't be "doing it live" once I get this blog really up and running (editing my writing is generally a good thing I think), but it's so nice to give myself permission to get that feedback loop up and going. Quick feedback loops are a big reason of why I went into programming!