I have always wanted to make a personal website that I felt proud of. As someone who is not technical (yet…), I now have that opportunity due to the progress of AI Tools. Shoutout Claude and Cursor for being the best combo I have found thus far. I never felt like I could really bring my ideas to life but now I can.
Lately, I have also been feeling the urge to write more, so when I stumbled across Quartz, it seemed like the perfect project for my current interests.
Here are some of the things I did to get this site off the ground that seem trivial to a developer but I’m proud of:
- Created my own Quartz repo in Github
- Learned how to push a Github commit
- Switched hosting platforms form Squarespace to Cloudflare
- Set up an automatic deployment for updates to my prod branch
- Used Quartz to connect Obsidian to my site
Here are some of the things I did to make my site custom:
- Added a gradient background for light (sunrise) and dark (sunset) mode
- Added a gently swaying palm tree to my background
- Hid the date and article-title from my homepage
- Updated the favicon of my homepage
We’ll see where this project goes but I am proud of this site. It was fun to learn some front-end engineering.
Shoutouts
- AI for making code less daunting and allowing me to build things.
- Jacky Zhao for working on Quartz and Sunlit, the inspiration for the gently swaying palm tree.