Hello World: Why I Finally Built a Personal Site
After years of letting my work speak for itself, I decided it was time to put a stake in the ground. Here's why, and how I built this site.
I’ve been meaning to build a personal site for years. Not because I need one to get work done — I’ve been shipping energy analytics platforms, writing research papers, and building tools for utilities without one. But there’s something about having a single place that says this is what I care about that felt overdue.
Why now?
Two reasons. First, I’ve been doing enough varied work — PhD research, open-source R packages, proprietary SaaS platforms, ASHRAE publications — that it’s genuinely hard to point someone to one place that captures all of it. LinkedIn is fine, but it flattens everything into a resume.
Second, I wanted to practice building in public. Most of my professional work lives behind NDAs or in enterprise tools. A personal site is something I can iterate on openly.
How it’s built
Astro for static pages, Svelte for the two interactive bits (theme toggle and timeline detail card), Tailwind for styling, and Vercel for hosting. The content is just YAML and MDX files — no CMS, no database. I can add a new project by creating a file and pushing to git.
The whole thing is designed to be minimal and fast. No animations beyond what serves navigation. No gradients. One accent color.
What’s next
I’ll be adding real content over the coming weeks — filling in the timeline with actual project details, writing about what I’m learning, and maybe shipping some interactive demos of the tools I build. For now, this is the foundation.