As a good first programming post I thought I’d write about how I built this website, the stack I chose, and some of the decisions I made along the way.
If I keep growing this site then all of this might change, but this is how it looks at the time of launch.

The stack I chose

What better way to start than with the tech stack? I wanted something that I could build quickly and easily, that I was familiar enough with, and that I could deploy as a static site without needing a backend or server. I also chose to write the components and styles myself rather than using a utility framework, since this is a personal project and I am prioritising learning and experimentation over speed and convenience.

Vue, Vite, and TypeScript

For those unfamiliar, Vue is a UI and reactivity framework - a lot like Svelte but with a little less syntax magic.
I really like the reactivity model used in Vue. I’ve found it to be simple enough that I can easily reason about it, explain it to other engineers, and I even played around with recreating it in C++ at one stage just for fun.
The single-file-components also keep things nice and neat, with all the scoped and reactive styles fully supported by the framework. My only real criticism with SFCs is that I wish you could have multiple components in the same file, as it would sometimes simplify things having a tiny child component colocated with its parent component.

When using Vue you’re pretty much obligated to use Vite as the build tool, which even though it was written by Vue’s creator, has also become a popular choice for people using other frameworks like React.

When running npm create vue@latest, you get a bunch of options of extra things to include. Vue Router and Pinia are pretty easy includes if you don’t have a strong preference for something else, and TypeScript something that I’ll always include unless there’s a compelling reason not to.
Static typing is something everyone should use for anything non-trivial. I’ve worked on large codebases with loosely typed systems (like games with a large amount of Lua) and maintaining that is its own special type of challenge.
If you’re writing anything that you want to last, or (like me) you find that the type hints give you a much better DX, then you want TS if you’re doing frontend work.

No tailwind, no component library

When starting this project I had to have a think about what I wanted it to be. I considered using component libraries to speed up development, and tailwind for easier styles, but ultimately decided against both.
If this is my personal site, I want to build the components myself. Not because I think the results will necessarily be better, but because I want to learn to do better - especially when it comes to things like accessibility and responsive design.

If this was a large project with a number of contributors I might have made a different choice, but for a personal page this approach makes sense.

The blog

Blog posts are Markdown files in the repo, which get transformed into HTML at build time using markdown-it. I have a simple script that runs before builds to handle the transformation (and build the index), which has a watch mode for faster iteration. For now I have no CMS, no database, no API, just files in the repo and a static site to deploy.

Final thoughts

There’s really nothing too complicated going on here, but I thought it worth sharing for anyone interested.
If you’re just starting out and want to build a personal site, I hope this gives you some ideas of how to get going.

Would learning PHP to build a weird old-school comments system be a fun experiment? Probably not.

Hello! My name is Blake, I’m a programmer who has worked in and out of game development for around 20 years, and it’s high time I made a website and started writing down some of my thoughts about everything.

You can expect most of my posts to be about programming or games, but I also expect to write about other things that cross my mind.
Some days I’ll post about programming language design, useful tools, best practices and other things like that.
If I find something interesting in a game I might write about the mechanics and design choices involved, or maybe I’ll just heap some praise (or criticism) at it. I like digging into media in general, so there could be some non-game stuff in there too.
And then there will be other posts that could be about life in general or ‘middle-aged man yells at cloud’ about some new tech or trend or whatever.

I’ve not had a blog before so we’ll just have to see where it takes us!

Why a blog?

It’s become more and more clear over time that social media and short-form content aren’t a great way to properly discuss a topic. I’m not looking for a big viral post that gets a heap of engagement, I’d much rather have a place where I can take my time writing something meaningful, and where it can live indefinitely without getting buried in an algorithmic feed.
That’s also why I’ve added an RSS feed (if you don’t know what this means I encourage you to look it up!), I think subscribing to blogs is a much better way to keep up with someone’s writing than following them on social media.
Back in the aughts and early 2010s, I followed a lot of programming blogs and it was a great way to discover new ideas and perspectives. I want to keep that ecosystem alive and contribute to it in some small way.

Plus I like having ownership of my words. I can write what I want and share it for as long as I want. This is my blog.

What else is on this site?

If you’ve somehow stumbled onto this post without poking around the rest of the site, there’s a few other sections to check out:

About

This page will tell you a bit about me, my background, my skills, and contact info.

Portfolio

A portfolio of things I've worked on in my professional life. There's some cool stuff in there so check it out if you're interested.

Lab

Smaller experiments and interactive demos. Things built to explore an idea or to see if something was possible. More rough edges, more fun.

Blog

This! Longer thoughts on whatever I've been thinking about recently.

Welcome

So welcome to my blog! I can’t promise I’ll post often, but hopefully when I do it’ll be worth reading. If you want to keep up with new posts, consider subscribing to the RSS feed - I expect updates to be sporadic so an RSS reader is probably the best way to keep up-to-date.

Ending with a joke feels like a good idea. Maybe I’ll think of a good one some day!