I was on paternity leave for the last couple of weeks, and in between diaper changes, I finally managed to redo my personal website.
I first created laktek.com more than twenty years ago. The earliest snapshot in Wayback Machine is from 4th December 2001. It was how I learned the ropes of web development, and blogging about my work helped me land some cool gigs early in my career.
Sadly, it's been in "personal website purgatory" for the last seven years or so. I had plans to resurrect it, but other priorities won over.
Building a personal website in 2024 is joyful. It felt like being transported back to 2005, except for writing CSS today, which is 1000x easier. More than anything, it feels good to break out of the social media rut and have a place to explore and express freely.
Funny enough, while rebuilding the site, I also rewrote Punch, the static site generator that powers this website. I originally released Punch 12 years ago, and it was one of my most successful open-source projects. There's more work left to do before releasing the new version, but I'm very excited about what it makes possible.