It’s been a long time since I had a personal site with any content on it. Think … like 8 years long. 😱

During my computer science degree, I had a WordPress blog where I posted course reviews (and probably other things, but I don’t remember now!) However, after graduation, a security developer at work found my site and was kind of mean to me about using WordPress - because it had a lot of security flaws. Now I know he was kind of just a dick, and the security of my 5 course reviews probably wasn’t critical (and I was updating)!

I tried to restart my site a few times - I believe the most recent was in Gatsby - and I never got past the initial design phase. And that’s because I’m NOT a designer. I love good design, but it’s not something I personally excel at. So, this time I’ve just used the Astro default blog template as a starting point. I’m already so happy with where I am because I can ship this sooner, and then get moving on things that really matter to me.

So, what matters to me - why am I doing this now? It really boils down to three things.

1. Inspiration

I would be remiss to mention that the inspiration behind this was Andy Bell redesigning his site from scratch for 2026 - and blogging about it.

I’ve talking about 2026 being the year of the website, so I’m actually doing it now. I’m completely redesigning and re-building my personal website and doing it all in the open, so I hope you’ll follow along.bell.bz/it-really-is...

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— Andy Bell (@bell.bz) January 29, 2026 at 4:34 AM

Andy is a developer I have really looked up to for a long time, and I’m excited to follow along with him (and maybe learn a thing or two!). Just him talking about doing this himself made me excited to try the same, and maybe some of my posts can hopefully inspire others to give it a go.

2. Shake off the rust

At this point, I’ve been on maternity leave for 10 months (woo for Canada - and the rest of the non-cruel world!). I have also not coded even the smallest thing in that entire time before re-starting this website. (I’m sure fellow infant parents understand).

I’ve been feeling very non-confident about returning to work, especially considering all the upheaval in the world and industry. Flexing my learning muscle should help me feel a little bit better about it??? Right??

3. Learn Astro

I’ve always been curious about Astro. I have been fortunate enough to play with a few frameworks at work (most recently Gatsby and Next.js), but a lot of developers I respect have been hyping up Astro for a while.

I have so far been impressed by how simple it has been to get to where I am with this site so quickly, and the development process is even running well on the ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD MacBook Pro I am working on. (Yes, you read that right! Maybe after I return to work I will treat myself to a new computer …)

4. Knowledge sharing

As a full-time web developer, I get the amazing opportunity to learn every single day - and get paid for it. Sometimes, I even get to discover cool and/or completely bananas ways to achieve things that I originally didn’t think were possible.

Further, I have been following some of the more recently released browser features, and I would love to play around with them, talking through what I tried and showing examples.

I want a way to be able to share these learnings with the web, as well as develop my own ability to write and explain why I do certain things (especially in this world of ever-increasing AI usage). That is what I hope to do on this blog - even if I am explaining the simplest thing, perhaps it will help a budding software developer overcome an issue. Or perhaps it will simply enhance my own understanding of a topic - either way, both are a win to me.

Excited to see where this goes!