Craft is focusing on the things that no one else will notice, and it's more important than ever. We live in a world where we are regressing to the mean, and where what truly matters gets lost in the sea of crap. I'm relaunching my new website, with the hopes that it does not get lost in the abyss. I'll be writing about the software industry and the things I find interesting.
Today we'll be touching on the tools that software engineers use and how that is changing. It's not a surprise that AI has fundamentally changed the way that many software engineers work, which has led many to speculate or worry whether or not AI will replace software engineers. I could speak on this for hours, and I plan to talk about it here in the future, but today we're going to focus on the tools and technologies that made this redesign possible.
I built my original website in 2020. It was a simple website, something that people could visit when they saw my email ended in arnopoulos.io. However, it's begun to show its age, and it doesn't reflect the work that I can produce today. So a couple of days ago, I decided to take on the challenge of redesigning my website.
I used several tools to help with this redesign, and like most developers nowadays, it started with Claude and several tools oriented around Claude. The primary tools that I used to create this were Superpowers and Impeccable. Now, I do have custom tooling around my Claude setup that I hope to talk more about in the future, but Superpowers and Impeccable did most of the heavy lifting. With those two tools, I was able not only to build a high-quality website but also to capture the intent and direction of what I want from it.
Some of the core foundations for building this are:
- Astro
- Vercel
- Tailwind
- TypeScript (obviously)
However, the keen-eyed among all of you might have noticed that the background on this website is not static and simulates the sky. The background is rendered using WebGL, a tool that would have been out of reach for me outside of the age of AI because of my lack of time and lack of patience when it comes to rendering engines. With a few prompts and a direction, I was able to get it to show exactly what was in my head. In fact, if you come back later, you'll see that the sky actually transitions with the time of day. This transition logic actually posed a huge design challenge as well, specifically with WCAG, but again, with a couple of prompts, I was able to build something that met WCAG standards.
As time goes on, I hope to share my projects and ideas here, some of which include things like design system enforcement at the compiler level and my experience using Swift distributed actors. So if any of this interests you, follow me on LinkedIn, where I'll be sending new posts.