Shipping the final site

A final update in the personal website series. I wanted to redesign my personal website with CodeYam, and it is now live on my custom domain. Refreshing it, we have the typing animation we wanted and the images changing.

We tested the site on all sorts of shapes and sizes, so if I adjust my browser the image stays centred with me in it, and the same on mobile. If you are newer to building websites I strongly recommend using the native CodeYam functionality to test, but also checking it on the devices you actually have. One thing I do is ask a friend or partner if they have a different phone from mine, so there are different devices, browser sizes and browsers to test on.

When we did the first draft the text was very long. I am not a big fan of AI-generated text right now, because it often sounds generic rather than personal, and since it is a personal site I wanted it in my voice. What I have found is that AI can be a really helpful editor. I copy-pasted a section into ChatGPT and asked it to make it tighter and more direct without losing my tone or my voice.

Especially if you are new to building, there is often a question of when it is good enough to ship. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. It is important to get your progress and your work out there, and for people newer to building software it can feel really scary, because you want the perfect precise thing. That is often impossible, and it will stop you shipping anything at all.

Another way to think about it is the risks and trade-offs. If you are building a rocket ship it is extremely important to get it right. On a personal website, a bug might be a little embarrassing, but nobody is harmed by a typo or a small bug. If you have a database holding people's contact details or other sensitive information, you want to put a lot more thought into security and how you manage that.

As we build out our CodeYam curriculum we will get into different types of applications, different levels of complexity, and the decisions you make as a builder, including when to launch, how much to think about analytics and security, adding alerts and alarms in case things break, and preparing to scale. For this episode I wanted to wrap up my personal site, which is live, and I am already iterating away on it with CodeYam.