Rebuilding this site
The previous version of this site was an 8-bit retro portfolio built with NES.css — pixel fonts, a power-off button with a fake CRT shutdown animation, a mini-game, parallax stars. It was fun to build once, but it had stopped being useful a long time before I got around to replacing it.
A few things made that obvious:
- It had an unresolved git merge conflict marker committed straight into the homepage. Nobody noticed because nobody was looking at the source, which is its own kind of signal.
- Whole sections were still placeholder text — "Key Word", "human / human / human" — left over from early scaffolding and never replaced.
- The testimonials were invented. Not exaggerated — invented, with names and job titles attached to people who don't exist.
- The résumé page had a fake employer, a fake phone number, and a computer science degree from a university I didn't attend.
None of that was malicious, it was just accumulated cruft from a template-first build, and it had quietly turned the site into something closer to fiction than a personal page.
What changed
This version is a Next.js app — TypeScript, Tailwind, MDX for writing — instead of a pile of static HTML files pulling three different CDN frameworks. More importantly, the content changed philosophy: real information, or a visible TODO, never a plausible-sounding placeholder.
Concretely, that means:
/workhas real projects, including the ones that are still in progress, described honestly as in progress./cvhas some fields explicitly marked as needing real dates and details filled in, instead of guessing.- The testimonials, the mini-game, the fake scheduling form — gone. If a section couldn't be made real, it didn't make the cut.
Why now
Mostly because a personal site should be able to answer "what is this person actually doing right now" without lying to do it. The old one couldn't. This one is built so that keeping it honest is just a matter of editing a Markdown file and pushing to main.