I finally rebuilt this site

The previous version of this site had been around since roughly 2017. It was hand-written HTML and CSS, partly because that was what I knew, but also because I had some opinions about how websites were supposed to be built.

At the time, I thought using frameworks and similar tools was taking a shortcut. “Cheap tricks” is probably a fair description of how I viewed them. If I could write it myself, then I should write it myself, and using something that did part of that work for me felt lazy.

That approach did produce a website. It also produced a website that was awkward to maintain, especially when I just wanted to add something quickly.

An update meant going back into the page markup and making changes by hand. That was manageable, but it was enough of a process that I would put it off. I also wasn’t really feeling that I needed the space at the time, so there wasn’t much pushing me to do anything about it. Mostly, I left it alone.

Eventually, the site needed to catch up with the work.

This version uses Astro, with projects and other content stored in Markdown and JSON. Adding a project or changing my work history is much more straightforward now. There’s also room for individual project write-ups and this blog, so I can explain things beyond what fits in a gallery tile.

My opinion of frameworks has changed, too. I still want to understand how things work underneath them. But I’m more interested now in whether a tool helps me build something useful and keep it working. Writing every part manually doesn’t automatically make the result better, and in this case it made maintaining my own portfolio enough of a chore that I wasn’t doing it.

One thing I deliberately kept through the rebuild was the old work.

Some of it is from college. Some of it is unfinished. Some of it shows skills I’ve used occasionally rather than spent a career specializing in. There are things here that I would approach differently now, and things that simply aren’t as flattering as the work I’m doing today.

I’m aware of that. I still think they belong here.

This site is an archive of my growth as much as it is a place to show what I can do now. Removing everything that no longer represents my best work would lose a lot of that history. The early modeling assignments, older web projects, and small tools all show what I was working on and learning at different points.

They also show a range of experience that a job title or a short list of technologies doesn’t really cover. I’m not an expert in every discipline represented here, and including a project isn’t meant to imply that I am. But I do have working knowledge of a broad number of skills. Sometimes that’s enough to handle a small part of a project myself, understand how someone else’s work fits into mine, or have a useful starting point when an unfamiliar problem comes up.

The dates and descriptions should help make those distinctions clear. An early class assignment can be an early class assignment. An unfinished project can explain what works and where I stopped.

I’d like to use the blog to add more of that context: what prompted a project, what I had to figure out, and what I’d change if I were doing it again. Rebuilding the site seemed like a reasonable place to start.

– Patrick