Rebuilding this site

The previous version of this site was an 8-bit retro portfolio built with NES.css. It had pixel fonts, a power button with a fake CRT shutdown animation, a small game, parallax stars, and probably more attention spent on making the interface feel like an old Nintendo game than anyone really needed.

It was fun to build.

For a while, that was enough.

Eventually, it stopped being useful. The site still looked like a portfolio, but the more I looked at it, the more it felt like it belonged to an older version of me.

A few things made that obvious.

Some sections were still carrying placeholder content from the original build. There were bits of old copy that had survived several rounds of editing, along with a few design ideas that made sense when the site was mainly an experiment but felt slightly strange once it became my actual portfolio.

There were also a few things that looked polished from the outside but didn't really add much anymore.

That's probably the downside of building a personal site around a visual idea. Once you've spent enough time making the idea work, it becomes surprisingly easy to keep things simply because they look good.

Eventually, I had to decide whether I was maintaining a portfolio or maintaining a theme.

What changed

The new version is a Next.js app with TypeScript, Tailwind and MDX for writing.

The stack changed, but that's probably the least interesting part of the rebuild.

The bigger change was deciding that the site should be built around the content first.

The /work page is for actual projects, including things that are still being built.

The /cv page is for the things that actually belong on a CV.

The blog is for everything that doesn't really fit anywhere else.

And if something doesn't have a useful reason to exist, it probably doesn't need a section on the website just because there is room for one.

That meant removing quite a few things from the old version.

The mini-game is gone.

The extra interactions are gone.

Some of the more decorative sections are gone.

The site is considerably less interested in proving that I can make a website and more interested in telling you what I'm actually working on.

Why now

I think I had outgrown the old site before I realised it.

The retro design was fun, but it represented an older version of me. At some point I started caring more about whether the site looked like a portfolio than whether it actually told someone what I was doing.

A personal website should be able to answer a fairly simple question:

What is this person actually doing right now?

The old version wasn't particularly good at that.

This one is.

I also wanted the site to be something I could actually keep updating. The content now lives mostly in Markdown and the site is built around making changes quickly rather than making every change feel like another redesign.

So this isn't really a complete reinvention.

It's more of a correction.

Less portfolio template.

More personal site.

Less trying to look finished.

More room for things that are still being built.