Creating a website in 2026

Published Date: May 10, 2026

Every December, I like to reflect on the past year and set a theme for the next. My theme for 2025 was Recovery: I had spent the past two years in grad school and planning my wedding while working full-time, and I was ready for a break!

When it came time to plan for 2026, I decided that my theme for the year would be Creativity. I wanted to devote more time and energy into hobbies like writing and programming side projects. I started brainstorming ideas, and found that creating my own website could cover both writing and programming in one go.

Astute readers may notice that the published date on this blog post is five months into the year — sort of a late start for a year-long theme.

My plans for personal development got a little derailed at the start of the year by the widespread discovery of a new AI tool called Claude Code. I got access to Claude Code (and GitHub Copilot CLI shortly afterwards) through my employer in early January. I’ve spent a lot of time since then learning and understanding these new tools, and honestly burnt myself out a little bit in the process. It took time to adjust to all the changes they brought, which left me with minimal energy for side projects.

In early April I started working on this website. I intentionally developed it the old-fashioned way — reading documentation, finding templates/references, inspecting websites’ source, and (gasp!) typing code myself — instead of relying on these new AI tools. I wanted to prove to myself that I could build something completely my own.

Requirements

Like any good engineer, I started with specifying a list of requirements of what I wanted for this project:

Technologies

With my list of requirements in hand, I went out and did some research. It’s been a few years since I did frontend development, and my previous experience in enterprise-style React would be overkill.

I looked at what I was already familiar with and what was recommended/used by people I follow, and settled on the following:

Website Development

I found Hacker News to be really helpful in finding blogs and blog posts for inspiration. My best reference was cassidoo’s blahg template, which helped me a ton with getting the general structure set up and configuring my RSS feed properly.

It took me a little over a month to go from “hey I should start my website” to publishing it live. The actual programming effort was several blocks of 1-2 hours on weeknights, and a few longer 4-6 hour blocks on weekends.

I did use ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot’s VS Code extension to help me in some tasks. They were very helpful in helping me understand CSS styling and fix a couple bugs with theme support.

Reflections

Now that the website is live, I can judge how well I satisfied my requirements!

Overall I am really happy with my technology choices and current design. Astro was very easy to set up and use. Cloudflare Pages took a bit more effort to figure out — the onboarding UX is shared with Workers, which is the default path that I created twice on accident (whoops). But once I clicked the right buttons, everything got set up quickly and without issues.

I have my repository configured to automatically deploy on merges to main branch, and it is so cool to see how quickly things go live!

I’m still figuring out my writing process. Thus far I’ve been writing directly in my code editor, so I can immediately see how content looks on the page while connected to the dev server. In my fiction writing I’ve been using Obsidian, and I’d like to use it for my blog post drafts too.

In terms of costs, I’ve spent just about $20. That’s cheaper than your average movie ticket and popcorn, or enough to cover a couple trips to the boba tea shop 😄