why i am finally making my website

2026-07-04

For years my personal website was a someday project. The kind of thing I would scope out, feel the size of, and quietly close the tab.

what changed

Two things. First, I can move a lot faster now — with AI doing the heavy lifting on the frontend, the React portfolio you are reading went from someday to this weekend. The parts that used to eat evenings — layout, tokens, the fiddly responsive work — stopped being the reason not to start.

The site stopped being a wall and started being an afternoon.

Second, I wanted an excuse to learn Go. Not a tutorial-shaped excuse — a real one, with routes and JSON shapes and edge cases I would have to actually handle.

the split

So I drew a line down the middle of the repo:

• The frontend, docs, and tooling are AI-generated — directed and reviewed by me, but not hand-typed.
• The backend — the Go API — is mine. Handwritten, on purpose. Writing it is the point; letting a model do it would defeat the exercise.

frontend/   # AI-built React + a mock API stand-in
backend/    # handwritten Go — the whole reason

Right now a small Express server mocks the API so the site has something real to fetch while the Go service grows up next to it. Same routes, same JSON, different author.

why finally

Because the tradeoff finally made sense: let the machine build the part I have built a hundred times, and spend my own hours on the part I actually want to learn.