built my own site from scratch
June 2026. I decided I needed a place to keep everything.
Not just random notes or tweets, but something that actually felt like mine. A record of what I was going through during this bear market. I had been writing things down here and there, mostly in Notion and scattered across a few private documents. It worked, but it never felt permanent. It always felt like I was storing things in someone else’s house.
I kept thinking about making my own site. The thought had crossed my mind before, but I always dismissed it quickly. Building a website was something other people did. People who could code. People who knew what they were doing. For someone like me, the options were always the same: pay someone else to do it, or just keep using tools made by other people. I never really considered that there was a third option.
At first, the idea felt ridiculous.
I had almost no experience with HTML or CSS. The last time I touched anything related to web development was years ago, and even then it was just basic stuff I forgot immediately. The thought of starting from scratch made me feel small. I was scared it would end up looking like a cheap copy of someone else’s site. I didn’t want to make something that clearly showed I didn’t know what I was doing. There was this quiet feeling of “this isn’t for me” that kept coming back every time I thought about it.
Still, I started anyway.
I didn’t try to learn coding properly. I used AI to help me build it instead. Not because I was trying to take shortcuts, but because I knew if I tried to learn everything from zero first, I would probably give up before I even started. So I began with small, stupid experiments. Changing colors, adjusting layouts, trying to make things look slightly less terrible. One of the first things I tried was an ASCII art of a camel. It looked completely flat and broken at first. After a few adjustments it started to look somewhat decent. That small thing felt strangely satisfying.
I also spent time playing with colors. I ended up liking a shade of goldenrod. It wasn’t anything special, but it was the first time I actually chose something for a site I was building myself. Little decisions like that started to add up. Slowly, the site stopped feeling like something I was forcing together and started feeling like something I was shaping.
I went with something called Astro, even though I had no idea what it was at first. The learning curve felt steep for the first few days. There were concepts I didn’t fully grasp, and I had to ask around and experiment a lot. But after a while, the static nature of it started to make sense. It felt lighter. It felt like something I could actually maintain without getting overwhelmed. That choice alone taught me more than I expected.
The first time I saw the site actually running properly, something shifted.
It wasn’t a big moment. There was no dramatic feeling of accomplishment. But I remember staring at it and realizing that this thing was actually working because of decisions I made. Even the small, ugly parts were mine. I didn’t have to wait for someone else to finish it. I didn’t have to explain what I wanted and hope they understood. I could just change it if I didn’t like it.
That feeling was new.
There were so many things I used to automatically assume I had to pay other people to do. Websites, scripts, automations, even simple tools. I had gotten used to the idea that certain things were outside my reach. Seeing something I made actually exist on the internet made that assumption feel less true. It was still simple, still rough in many places, but it was mine.
In the context of this bear market, that small realization felt heavier than it should have.
Most of this period has been about waiting. Waiting for the market to recover, waiting for better opportunities, waiting for things to feel normal again. A lot of that waiting can start to feel like time being wasted. But this site became one of the few things that didn’t feel wasted. It was something I built while everything else was quiet. It didn’t make me money. It didn’t solve any big problem. But every part of it was something I understood, even if only barely.
It felt different from the things I used to buy or commission from other people. Those things were finished products. This one still had my fingerprints all over it. The awkward parts, the parts I was still figuring out, the parts that would probably change in a month. All of it was visible.
I don’t think this site is anything special to anyone else. To me, it’s mostly just a place to write and keep track of things. But it’s also the first real artifact I have from this period. Something I can point to and say I made it during the time when almost nothing else was moving forward.
It’s still early. The site will keep changing as I keep learning. More pages will be added. More things will be fixed and broken and fixed again. But the fact that it exists at all already means something to me.
This is what I have right now. A small site, built slowly, while the market stayed quiet. It’s not much. But it’s mine.