I built a personal site. I don't know how to code.
I went part-time and decided to reinvent myself. The first thing I did was build a website, using Claude Code as a development partner. Here's how it went.
At the start of this month I went part-time at the company I’ve worked at for six years. A difficult choice, one that made me think a lot. I decided to take this path because I wanted to dig deeper into myself, what I enjoy doing, my skills and my place in the world, especially given the technological revolutions we’re all facing.
So I decided to build a website. My website.
It seemed like the right kind of experiment. I’ve never published anything in my entire life, never built anything of my own. And yet I was looking for something concrete that would put me face to face with real questions. The first one: how do I actually want to present myself on the internet?
Building with Claude Code
I’m not a developer. I can read a few lines of code if I bang my head against them long enough and with the help of AI, but writing it from scratch is completely outside my comfort zone. That’s why I used Claude Code to build all the components of this site.
While I was thinking about how to approach this challenge, I already had some ideas in my head: a design draft, a visual direction, a rough structure. Claude Code helped me turn all of that into something real.
The collaboration happened mostly in the details. We figured out together how to build the components, I had Claude build the accessibility widget you can see on the site from scratch, and every now and then it would propose alternatives or ask me questions to find the right solution. It was a new and interesting way of working, and I learned a lot from it.
For the stack I chose Astro, Tailwind and Vercel after some research. I was looking for something simple and accessible that would let me experiment and step into a world that is completely new to me.
The part I didn’t expect to enjoy
The site connects to three APIs:
- Spotify, for the monthly playlists you can find on my About page
- Discogs, for my vinyl collection, which I’m a huge fan of
- Hardcover, for the book I’m reading right now
Thank you Sanderson, for writing The Stormlight Archive and making me fall in love with reading again.
From the moment I decided to create this site, one of my priorities was to put myself and what I love online. These three APIs are just the beginning.
Presenting yourself
The hardest part, but also the most rewarding, was figuring out how to present myself. How do I want to show myself to the world? What do I want to say about myself? What do I leave out? It’s not simple, especially because you don’t know who will read you or what they’ll take away from it. Learning to describe yourself effectively is a challenge that also taught me a lot about who I am. I still don’t have answers to all these questions. But facing them was absolutely worth it.
And so, here we are.
The site is live. I made it, and this is the first post of a journal I hope will grow a lot. Some sections are still imperfect, there are still bugs, but I’ll keep working on it.
In the future, what you can expect to read about are my musical discoveries of the month, a hike I particularly enjoyed, or the boulder problem I’m trying to close at the gym.
The design, the content and the goals are all mine. Claude Code helped me make real something that until a few months ago I genuinely thought was unimaginable.
If you want more details on the technical side, I wrote a breakdown in the colophon.