Starting from an empty folder
I wanted a personal website. What I actually wanted was an excuse.
There’s a category of knowledge you can’t get from tutorials, because tutorials hand you a finished system and walk you through it backwards. You never face the decisions. You never find out which ones were load-bearing and which were arbitrary. You certainly never find out what it costs to change your mind six weeks in.
So this site is the excuse. It starts as a handful of files and it will grow, deliberately and slowly, into something with a build pipeline, a database, a mailing list, real security, and real monitoring. Every step is a decision I have to make and defend, and I’m going to write those decisions down here — including the ones I get wrong.
What I’m actually trying to learn
Design, first. Not “make it pretty” but the underlying grammar: type scales, spacing systems, why a line of text should be about sixty-five characters wide. How a design in Figma becomes a design in a browser without a week of pixel pushing.
Then everything behind it. How code on my laptop becomes a site on the internet. What a deploy pipeline is for and what it protects you from. How tracking actually works, and why the honest answer to “do I need cookies?” might be no. How you keep bots out. How you’d scale a system if anyone ever showed up.
The rule
Nothing gets built until I can explain the trade-off. Every feature on this site has an alternative I chose against, and if I can’t say what that alternative was and why I passed on it, I don’t understand what I’m doing yet.
That’s the whole project. Let’s see how it goes.