This might be the most basic website on the net. No ads! No cookies! No pop-ups! No images! Isn't it great?
I haven't written real code in 20 years. I've used automation tools. Edited plenty of code. Spoken in pseudocode to real engineers. But I haven't sat down in front of an IDE and written anything from scratch in 20+ years. But I'm very inspired by the rising energy around AI, so I decided to spend the last few weekends assessing whether I could teach myself enough to build something from the ground-up.
For reference, back in the late 90s, I coded in c and java. At the time, though, I primarily built websites because that's what many people wanted and I could earn money doing it fairly quickly. I also enjoyed design. I was introduced to web development on an SGI Irix machine in 1993 and was immediately hooked on making things that could be experienced by other people.
Today, though, I retain only the principles and concepts of software engineering. How to 'think' like an engineer. But syntactically, I might as well be a beginner. Those files were purged from long-term storage decades ago.
So I downloaded Cursor, fired up YouTube and got to work.
I am totally overwhelmed. The landscape of frameworks, languages, libraries - overlapping and intersecting as subsets and supersets of each other - is endless. And while I love 45 minute YouTube videos for their concise, addictive novelty - I learn best by solving real problems I care about rather than lecture or tutorial-based stepwise learning.
Since I've been wanting to get back to writing, I decided to build this little site. I still need to write up the domain!
So here I am, back to basics. I'm handwriting in HTML5 and CSS with a basic pipeline for build, github and an action to deploy to my VPS. It's nice to know that twenty years later, CSS is still punishment for web designers calling themselves coders.
As I get better, this site will get better.
On AI; I have Cursor and a few LLM prompts as helpers, but they do not write code for me. I completely believe we'll have a hybrid engineer that will look superhuman by today's standards, but I also think that person will be great because they understand the underlying code they are working with.
Anyhow you knew it was coming: Hello, world.