On building personal sites
Why I keep rebuilding my personal site, and what I've learned from it.
Every developer I know has rebuilt their personal site at least three times. The pattern is familiar: you spend a weekend with a new framework, feel productive, ship something, look at it for six months, and then rebuild it again.
I’ve done it four times now. And I think I finally understand why.
It’s not about the framework
The first rebuild was about learning React. The second was about “simplicity” — going back to plain HTML. The third was about Astro (this one). Each time I told myself I was optimising for something: performance, maintainability, design purity.
But the real reason is less noble: a personal site is the one place where you have no constraints. No client requirements, no legacy code, no pull request review. You can make any decision you want, and you’re the only person who has to live with it.
That freedom is addictive. And slightly dangerous.
What I’ve learned
A personal site should be honest. It should reflect how you actually think and work, not an idealised version of yourself. When I had a site full of case studies and “crafted with love” copy, I felt like I was performing professionalism at someone. Nobody was fooled.
The version I have now has things that are just for fun: a fake AI behavioural analysis easter egg, canvas experiments that serve no purpose, a graph of skills that nobody needs to navigate. I like it more than any previous version.
Ship things that don’t need to exist. That’s the real lesson.