Building This Website

Created on April 05, 2026

2026   ·   projects   dev-tools   ·   projects

Why Build a Personal Website?

I’ve been meaning to set up a personal site for a while. Somewhere to put projects, share thoughts, and eventually pin travel photos on a world map. GitHub Pages felt like the obvious choice — free, version-controlled, and I already live on GitHub.

As a Product Manager who’s spent years shipping products at Microsoft, Meta, and gaming companies, I know the value of just launching something. Perfect is the enemy of shipped.

The Stack

  • al-folio — A Jekyll theme with 15k+ stars. It comes with dark mode, blog, projects, CV, and more out of the box.
  • Jekyll — Static site generator. No servers, no databases, just markdown to HTML.
  • GitHub Pages — Free hosting. Push to main, GitHub Actions builds and deploys.
  • GitHub Actions — al-folio needs custom plugins that GitHub’s default Jekyll builder doesn’t support. The included deploy.yml workflow handles the full build pipeline.

What’s Here So Far

  • Home — Quick intro and links
  • Projects — What I’m building (more coming)
  • Blog — You’re reading it
  • CV — The real deal — Microsoft AI, Meta, Age of Learning, Zynga, MobilityWare
  • Personal — Gallery, world map, GitHub repos

What’s Next

A few things on the roadmap:

  • More blog posts — agentic dev notes, memory research, product takes
  • Travel photo world map with Leaflet.js
  • Photo gallery
  • Contact form via FormSubmit

The Meta Part

This entire site was set up in a single session with an AI coding assistant. Every config edit, every page, every commit — pair-programmed with Claude. Like Guy from Free Guy putting on the sunglasses for the first time — once you see what agentic AI can do, you can’t unsee it.

If you’re thinking about building your own site, just start. Fork a theme, personalize it, ship it. You can always iterate.

First post. More to come.