What building this site actually taught me

I started with a simple goal: put my projects online. What I didn't expect was that the building would be the easy part, and everything around it — git, deploys, moving files — would be where the real learning happened.

Here's what I added: five projects, screenshots, a working contact form, this Notes section, a "now" page, and a resume link. None of that was the hard part.

The hard part

The bugs were the hard part, and they were rarely where I expected.

At one point I had two copies of my project on my laptop — one connected to git, one not — and couldn't figure out why my changes weren't showing up. I'd been editing the wrong folder.

Later, my updates kept not deploying even though every push "succeeded." Turns out a file was silently landing in the wrong place, so I was committing the old version over and over. The commit worked; the content was wrong. That one cost me a few rounds before I thought to actually check what was in the file instead of trusting that the commit did what I meant.

And a single stray = character at the top of a file broke an entire build. One character.

What I'd tell myself at the start

Two things.

Build locally before you push. Running the build on my own machine catches errors in seconds. Pushing and waiting for the deploy to fail catches them in minutes, publicly. Green locally means green live — I proved it to myself enough times to trust it.

Verify, don't assume. When something "won't update" no matter how many times you push, stop pushing and go look at what's actually in the file. A commit succeeding doesn't mean it committed what you think.

The Now page is the human part

There's one page here that isn't about code at all: the Now page. It's there because a portfolio can start to read like a spec sheet, and I'm more than one. I have thoughts, interests, and things I'm into this month — and I actually update it as they change.

So you'll find my current rotation there: Cyberpunk 2077 (hi, Johnny Silverhand), Friends (Thank you, Matthew Perry, for your sarcasm on the show), Lord Huron (yes, that song from 13 Reasons Why), and Fahrenheit 451 (whose themes feel a little too relevant lately). That mix probably says more about me than any project does.

The building taught me some things. The debugging taught me more. And the Now page is there to remind you there's a person behind all of it.