Why bother with a website?

You might ask: what is the point of building a website when we have Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.? And it’s a good question really. I mean, I could just use SquareSpace or WordPress. Why should I even care about having a website at all? Well, I’ve been developing software for a very long time… before websites were even a thing, so maybe I’m old-fashioned, but it feels like an interesting thing to do.

There’s so much interesting tech in static websites nowadays. I’ve decided to build this one using Astro, which is a neat and tidy little web framework.

Like most software engineers now, I vibe-coded most of it. There is little point in pretending this is not the future of software development. If I’d chosen the tech myself, I would have just gone with Next.js, as that’s what I’m most familiar with. But that’s one cool thing about vibe-coding. Ask a bunch of AIs what they would choose, and you learn new things. I learned about Astro, and I think it’s a good choice for this project. I can just use Markdown and Astro will compile it into HTML. It’s not exactly rocket surgery I know, but it’s a fun little project for an afternoon… and wow it’s easy to install stuff like this in Vercel.

Anyway, here we are, and I think it looks pretty fancy. All I need now is some more content.