Rebuilding My Personal Website

April 2026

It’s been almost two weeks since my last update, and during that time, I’ve been fully immersed in redesigning my personal website. The process has been a mix of inspiration, experimentation, simplification and a lot of learning along the way.

But before I get into what I built, I want to talk about what I looked at first. Because rebuilding a personal website is deceptively hard… not technically, but rather what to put inside it exactly.

Finding Inspiration

As I was piecing together the structure of my landing page, I explored other personal websites for inspiration.

Sites like Bruno Simon immediately grabbed my attention with their playful, interactive experiences — a fully 3D world built on Three.js where you drive a car through a portfolio. It’s absurd and brilliant, and it communicates something about its creator that no resume bullet ever could: this person plays seriously. Jesse Zhou operates on the same logic — you wait while their site “cooks your ramen,” then your thrown into an interactive ramen shop which surprises you at every turn.

Then there were the ones that led with craft over spectacle. Brittany Chiang is the quiet standard for developer portfolios: Dark Mode, great information architecture, clean typography, work front and center. It doesn’t try to dazzle you; it trusts its own substance. Sharlee (Charles Bruyerre) threads the needle between graphic design sensibility and web development chops — restrained, bilingual, composed. And Meowni (Monica Dinculescu) has real artistic minimalism: generative art you can click to regenerate, writing that sounds like a person, navigation that feels like browsing a friend’s apartment.

I also checked out Bonnie Xu and Sean O’Brien — each one had a unique approach to showcasing personality and projects. Even Adam Hartwig sparked ideas about subtle animations and flow, with a site full of character built around a genuine multi-disciplinary point of view.

All of them taught me something. All of them also made me second-guess everything.

Here’s the thing about looking at other portfolios: there’s a useful phase — where you’re absorbing sensibilities, clocking what resonates, building taste — and then there’s the second phase, where inspiration quietly turns into anxiety. The sites that stuck with me most weren’t the most technically impressive. They were the ones where I felt like I understood the person within about ten seconds. Clarity about who you are is harder to build than any visual effect, but it’s the only thing that actually transfers.

Getting Lost in Shaders

Inspired by some of the latest hero section designs in tech, I dived into experimenting with shaders in React. And it was mesmerizing. I got completely lost for hours, watching shapes and colors react to interactions in ways I hadn’t imagined.

Shaders are programs that run on the GPU and control how every pixel on screen gets colored. In the right hands they produce these liquid, luminous, almost organic visual effects — the kind of thing that makes a plain background feel like it’s alive. It felt like learning to paint.

It was such a blast… I even ended up integrating shaders into my site in a subtle but impactful way. It adds just enough flair without distracting from the content — which is a line I almost didn’t walk. At one point I had convinced myself that a striking visual effect would be the thing that made the site feel finished. But a site that says “I’m a web developer and founder” doesn’t need to be a tech demo. The shader had to serve the site, not the other way around.

When you look at Bruno Simon’s portfolio for too long, you start thinking your site needs a three-act structure and a physics engine. It doesn’t. Bruno built that because it’s genuinely an expression of who he is as a creative technologist. Copying the form without sharing the substance is just cosplay.

Simplicity Wins

After all the experimenting, I found myself pulling things back instead of adding more. Not because I had it figured out, but because I didn’t.

I kept just the essentials. A hero section, a few projects, and a contact area. It’s simple, maybe even a bit bare, but it feels clearer. And clarity is something I’m still trying to get right.

That’s been the hardest part. Knowing when to stop. It’s easy to keep adding sections, animations, and ideas, especially when you’re not fully confident yet. I definitely felt that. The shaders and interactions were fun, and I kept going back and forth on how much was too much.

I don’t think I’ve found the perfect balance yet. I’m still tweaking things, getting feedback, and making small improvements as I go.

For now, this version feels like a good snapshot of where I am. Still learning, still building, and trying to be a bit more intentional about what I choose to keep in.

The edit is the work.

Clarity Over Complexity

Rebuilding my website made me realize how easy it is to confuse progress with adding more. I tried a lot of things. Some of them were fun, some of them even made it into the final version, but most of the real progress came from stepping back and simplifying.

Looking through other portfolios, experimenting with shaders, and then cutting things down helped me understand what I actually wanted the site to do. Not impress everyone, just communicate a few things clearly.

One thing that helped me was setting a short timeline and sticking to it. It forced me to focus on what mattered instead of endlessly tweaking details. I asked myself a simple question: what are the few things this site needs to say? Then I tried to make those as clear as possible.

It’s still a work in progress. I’m continuing to tweak things, get feedback, and improve it over time. But getting something live that feels honest and clear has been more valuable than trying to make something perfect.