I Built This Site the Hard Way

I built my personal website, joeczubiak.com, the hard way and I wouldn't have it any other way.

As a developer, you'll often hear the advice to not build your own blog site and just stick to something established like WordPress or Ghost. Focus on the writing and not the building. There's merit to that if you really feel like your only goal is to write, but is that your only goal? Building your own site means exploring tech you want to explore and getting good at understanding technical SEO and semantic markup. You might even find techniques you use or learn in the process that lead to things you want to write about.

For myself, I've had four different versions of this website. A WordPress site with a store bought theme, a Ghost site, a Gatsby site, and now a Nuxt site. With Ghost, Gatsby, and Nuxt (Nuxt Content), I learned a new skill. I experience first hand where the problems and limits begin for each of them and I've had to get crafty to get around those limitations. With my handcrafted static versions, I've paid no money for hosting and I gained the site I wanted.

I never really want to use a UI to manage my content and as the winds of technology have shifted towards all things AI, it's left this site perfectly positioned to take advantage of LLMs and agentic coding. I can (and have) used it to improve my technical SEO implementation. I've worked hard to make my site as semantically correct as I can and AI is helping me improve upon that. I've been able to add new features and iterate the site much faster than I would otherwise.

While this was a bit of luck, staying on the tech side of things instead of the consumer side of things is always going to make you better positioned for the cutting edge of technology.

The first version of my site was a WordPress blog and I had exactly 1 post on it. Using WordPress didn't magically make me focus on writing. I just felt like I had a mediocre, half baked, site. On the other hand, having a handcrafted site that I spent a lot of time working on made me want to invest in myself. I spent a lot of time building this and now I can justify the amount of time it takes to write and add content to my creation.

I can feel the peanut gallery telling me that it's no longer the "hard" way, now that we have coding agents to do all the work. Even with the agents, I assure you it's the hard way. There are a million choices you need to make in order to create something that you are proud of, represents you, and is well organized and well structured. It's harder to have a vision that you bring to life than it is to pick out a template. I'm sure you'll learn more while you're in the weeds of the code even if the agent is doing most of the work.

When you reduce the bounds placed on you by building from scratch, you give yourself the freedom to roam. You never know where the roaming is going to lead and that's what's so great about it. During my time building my site, I wanted to add survey style questions to get some feedback from readers. Instead of using an existing solution, I built my own npm library which then led to me writing an article on how to do so. Something I didn't really know before embarking. This is what it's all about. Roaming, exploring, and sharing your journey.

Building my site the "hard" way lets me keep using the workflows that I know and I'm comfortable with. It lets me keep roaming and exploring all while putting something out in the world that feels like some of my best work.