This site is deliberately small. No component library, no CMS template, no analytics dashboard staring back at me. Just a warm cream page, one mono typeface, and a coral accent.
The rules I gave myself
- Hand-roll the hard parts. The photo lightbox, the GPX parser behind the running page, the RSS feed, the little constellation layout in the guestbook — a few dozen lines each, no dependency.
- Everything reachable from the keyboard. Hit
`for a terminal,?for the shortcuts,⌘Kto jump anywhere. - If a feature can't be quiet, it doesn't ship. A multi-dot cursor trail got built and deleted the same evening.
Why bother
Because the constraints are the fun part. When you can't reach for a library, you actually understand the thing you built — and it stays small enough to keep in your head. That's the whole point of a personal site: it should feel like yours, down to the last eight pixels.