I hadn’t written frontend seriously since 2016. I picked up this project partly because I wanted an online presence, and partly as a deliberate re-entry into building things for the web.
The approach: learn by shipping. Pick a modern stack, figure it out as I go, deploy early, iterate. Astro because it’s genuinely well-designed for content sites. Tailwind because it’s everywhere now and I wanted firsthand experience. Claude Code because it’s transformed how I build things, and I wanted to understand that transformation from the inside.
And i really missed the development of it all. I’ve been an engineering manager for years. I don’t write code at work in any serious way anymore, and I sorely missed it. Building this site reminded me why I fell in love with making things in the first place — the tight loop between writing something and seeing it work.
The blog lives at ship-it.red. The site and the blog are the same project: one is the professional surface, one is the thinking behind it. All combined serves as both a reminder to focus on my growth and to nourish my natural curiosity, with some venting to the internet ether mixed in I’m sure.