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Simplicity
My previous website was built with Nuxt and, although I love the framework and the people working on it, it was pure overengineering for a personal website with a blog.
Let me explain: even though I love JavaScript, neither I nor anyone else needs a single page application for a small informative site. I wrote about this topic a few years ago. All you get out of it is a worse user experience, worse performance, longer load times and, above all, more dependencies to maintain. But I built that website in 2018, when the only good developer experience was using frameworks and there was no static site generator offering anything close to it.
This time I’ve used Astro to generate a fully static site. In case you don’t know it, Astro uses a syntax very similar to JSX and generates completely static pages: you get the JavaScript developer experience, but without shipping JavaScript to the browser.
But Marina, your site has a sidebar, surely you need JS for that? Nope. The
sidebar opens and closes with a hidden checkbox and a couple of CSS selectors.
The file folders in the sidebar are HTML
<details>
and
<summary>.
And the
tooltips don’t carry a single line of JavaScript either, apart from working
around an iOS bug.
In the end there are only three cases with JavaScript across the whole site, and all three are vanilla: storing the states for the sidebar and chosen theme in localStorage, so the experience stays visually consistent across pages, and the tooltip fix above. Few lines in total, inlined.
The rest is magic thanks to the plugins in the Astro ecosystem. You can read the full stack in the README.md file.
Simplicity, to me, is just this: every piece I add has to justify why it’s there, and it can’t come at a performance cost for the person visiting the site. The best side effect of that is performance: the site scores a straight 100/100 across every Lighthouse metric, almost for free. Not because I spent weeks optimising, but because there’s barely anything to optimise.
Clarity
I didn’t only want to change the stack, I wanted to change the design too. And clarity here means visual cleanliness, while still caring a lot about the details.
I wanted to bring the inside of the website out. That transparency an IDE gives you when it shows you exactly which file you’re editing. That’s why the files you see in the sidebar are the real Markdown files, with their names and extensions, and the tab at the top tells you which one you’re reading.
The idea comes from a tool I use constantly: Obsidian. I like the clarity, or transparency, of the place where you edit the content and the place where you read it being the same place. The site doesn’t hide how it’s made: it shows you while you read it.
Personal
If a personal website doesn’t tell a story about you, it’s still a website but it isn’t personal.
The typefaces, for instance, weren’t chosen for aesthetics alone:
- Inter in honour of my friend Nevan, who passed away in September 2026 and who loved fonts and especially this one. His own website used it too.
- IBM Plex Mono in honour of the Carbon Design System, my favourite design system and one I got to work on a few years ago.
The site is also fully translated into English and Spanish, the two languages I speak every day. I also speak Catalan, but I can’t write it properly (it’s too difficult).
I want this to be a space where I can write not only about technology, but also about my life, my interests, my travels…
I also think the way we write is political, so in Spanish I’ll use the feminine as the neutral gender. Because I’m tired of the masculine gender being treated as universal and the feminine as merely particular.
In English it’s a bit easier, using the plural as the neutral gender, but I find that confusing in the singular form, so here too I’ll use the feminine as the neutral gender.
Is it worth having a personal website nowadays?
I think today more than ever. Among all the cloned websites that look the same, with the same designs, the same copy, no personality at all and every kind of pointless animations, it does make sense to have a personal website that shows a bit of who is behind it, her story, her imperfections and her humanity. One that shows us not only as professionals, but as people.
And to be clear, I don’t blame AI for the lack of originality in this industry, the blame lies with the people in it who have chosen to put in the bare minimum of effort, to the point that they don’t care about digital products anymore.
I think that’s a mistake, and it’s the wrong way to use AI too. I’ve used it a lot to create this website and it helped me to be faster, learn about technology I didn’t know before, automate tedious processes and focus on what I actually enjoy: creating.
Before celebrating, the most important part is still ahead: writing content. 🫡
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