Practice what you maintain

Why my portfolio now runs on the libraries I help maintain, and what else changed over one tired weekend.

Last week Zara Zhang posted this and it blew up:

Your personal website is the new resume

I bookmarked it and told myself I'd redesign my site. Then I remembered how long the last redesign took me.

It took me years

On January 1, 2023, I opened an issue on this repo called "Upgrade to v2". I closed it in June this year. Most of that time I just couldn't decide what my site should look like.

In the end I went with something like antfu.me. Anthony Fu is one of the people I look up to in open source, and I love his taste in design. A lot of this site borrows from his, even the handwritten logo. What's mine is the green, what's on the pages, and what it's built with.

So I didn't want to redesign again. I kept the look and changed the stack.

Practice what you preach

The site moved to Nuxt in June, mostly because I'd started liking Nuxt. Also, the green matched my avatar. Maybe that's why I love Zag too 😅

The styling was UnoCSS, which is also Anthony's work, and it served the site well. But I maintain Panda CSS and Ark UI, and I'm in the middle of a whole series on Panda's internals. It made sense for my own site to use what I maintain. So over the weekend I moved it to Panda CSS v2, with Ark UI underneath the components.

Using it on my own site shows me where Panda can improve, and I learn better patterns I can take back to the Panda ecosystem. For example, turning on strictTokens flagged every value I'd hardcoded, so I swapped them for design tokens. Panda's style lint now runs in CI on every pull request, next to formatting, linting and types.

The rest of the weekend

I was tired, but I was fired up too. Here's what else I shipped:

• Blog, Talks and Releases tabs. My first talk is on the talks page, and the releases tab lists every PR I've merged across open source.
• A handwritten logo and favicon.
• An accessibility pass: contrast, heading order, alt text and menu focus.
• Self-hosted fonts.
• Better share cards that show each post's description and its part in a series.

Staying on Nuxt for now

I also read Marina Aísa's What is the point of a personal website anymore?. She moved her site from a Nuxt single-page app to a static Astro site. Her rule: "every piece I add has to justify why it's there."

I'm not doing that yet. I like Nuxt, so I'm sticking with it for now. Maybe later.

Oh, and it's official now. I'm a maintainer at Zag 👼

If you want to see how Panda works under the hood, start with part 1 of the series.