How I Built This Site (and Why It Took Longer Than It Should Have)

I didn’t build this site from scratch. I found an Astro template I liked, forked it, and spent a few days making it mine. That’s it.

And yet I almost didn’t ship it.

Not because it was hard… Because I kept thinking it wasn’t ready. The bio didn’t feel right. The projects section needed one more tweak. Maybe I should build a custom design from scratch so it feels more “original.” Maybe I should add a case studies section first. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I’ve seen this pattern a hundred times in product work. The team spends three months perfecting something nobody has seen yet, convinced that shipping too early would be embarrassing. Meanwhile nothing is live, nothing is getting feedback, and the thing that seemed almost-done in month one is now bloated with features nobody asked for.

The personal site version of this is just as dumb. Nobody is waiting for your portfolio. Nobody will notice the spacing is slightly off. But they will notice if you don’t exist online at all.

What I actually did

Found a template I liked. Filled in my experience, projects, and bio. Tweaked a few things that were bothering me. Shipped it.

Total time: a few evenings.

The template already had the structure right: hero, projects, experience, about. The interesting part was never the tech. It was having something real to say in each section.

One thing I added that wasn’t in the template: a blog. Not because I planned to become a writer, but because writing is probably the simplest way to build a personal brand over time. You do interesting work, you write about it, people find it. It compounds. A portfolio shows what you’ve done. A blog shows how you think, and that’s harder to fake and more valuable to the right people.

TLDR

Shipping something imperfect beats building something perfect that never launches. Every time.

Ship it. Fix it after.