Website / build journal
Building a personal digital workshop
Bringing scientific work, independent writing, and new experiments together in one place. This website is the first project.
The question
What does a personal website look like when your work doesn’t fit neatly into one job title?
I wanted a place for the scientific papers, industrial experience, and writing I’ve already done, with room for things I haven’t figured out yet. That includes learning to build useful software with AI.
What I’m building
The first version is deliberately small: a readable home for my work, a publication index, links to The Polymerist, and a place to document projects as they develop. Future tools should be able to grow here without holding up the rest of the site.
Decisions so far
- Astro and static pages. Most of this site is text and links. It should be fast to read and straightforward to maintain.
- Markdown for project notes. Adding a project should start with writing, not a redesign.
- GitHub for source and history. Changes should be reviewable and reversible.
- Cloudflare Workers as the hosting target. The generated site is portable static HTML, so hosting can change without rewriting the content.
- AI-assisted implementation, with explicit checks. Useful assistance still needs factual review, working links, mobile checks, and a reproducible build.
What this demonstrates
This is an experiment in specifying a product, making tradeoffs, and testing the result with AI assistance. It is also a running record of what works and what needs more attention.
The source repository and build notes will record implementation and validation as the site develops. A successful local build is a different milestone from a working public deployment.