working with code is both an art and a science, but mostly it's an organic puzzle. for the longest time, whenever we needed something done, StackOverflow gave us some peace of mind. that's where those with guts went in order to flesh out the most ambitious projects. now the rise of AI definitely is a welcome shot of adrenaline in the heart of any project, big or small, commercial or personal.

thanks to this awesome tool, you can bring about your wildest brainchild.

for quite some time, I've been working on my website. it feels longer because, as personal projects go, it had to be paused and resumed as I went about my regular business. but that was a good thing, as it allowed me to carefully examine many different solutions and improve iteratively on what would not have been such a lively result.

starting with the layout, which was made in Figma and is noticeably different from what I ended up developing. there were elements like the top menu bar which I hadn't thought about placing but eventually made a lot of sense. not only that, but the planned resolutions were also quite different and had to be reworked. Initially I thought about designing a dark mode only, but a light theme represented an interesting challenge, both in technical and aesthetic terms. I didn't just want it to be a color palette switcher though, so I went with an IDE/text file approach — in both cases, relying heavily on ASCII art, which is something I always enjoyed.

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yeah, I use the free plan. it's like the paid one, but cheaper.

the theme also represented a challenge. for the longest time, I've adopted Bootstrap for its ease of use, but I went with the Radix base theme this time as it's a more forward-thinking approach to that framework, featuring single directory components (SDC) and other, well, opinionated implementations. it's a handy approach, although one that required quite some legwork, but once I got used to its way of looking at twig, I became very productive.

speaking of SDC, that represented another set of growing pains, but one that, in hindsight, was the right choice. as I, well, discussed ideas, concepts, and code over with AI, I was able to hold short development sprints in which I individually built the many components that make up my website: between customized and original ones, a whopping 17 in total!

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really putting the "pile" in "compile".

Drupal is, naturally, still the backbone of my project; but it outgrew version 10 as D11 was made available. there was also the matter of my content, which is the heart of my personal projects, and was duly collected from my Linkedin posts, with mirrors in both Medium and Substack. now my website stands as the single source of truth, but you're naturally welcome to read in the platform of your choice.

(by the way, Substack is the dark theme, while Medium remains the light version. LinkedIn is, well... LinkedIn.)

but let's not get a... head of ourselves. get it?

for me, the main benefit borne out of this project is that I was able to successfully develop my Front-end skills, and I want to share everything I learned. I'll be publishing a series of articles on everything, so stay tuned!