I love personal websites! Particularly the personal flare people add which cannot be achieved with a monolithic tool such as Weebly or Square Space. Hence I desired my very own custom website where I can play around with web dev (ish) and record my thoughts and projects. However during COVID I tried doing this and made a website with Jekyll which I ultimately abandoned. As an Electrical and Embedded Engineer, web dev is just not my expertise and I was not willing to dive so deeply into it to maintain a good looking and dynamic website. Fast forward to 2026 and agentic AI is able to figure out how to traverse the grand problem space that is full stack development. I can read javascript and make modifications, but understanding where and how things interact along with not knowing any web dev design patterns makes implementing my ideas slow and arduous.

Choosing a Framework

Motivated by the idea that I could utilize AI to bring my ideal website to life, I began some initial research. After all, as the acting project manager of this new website I need to ensure my base knowledge is up to snuff to guide my agent beyond telling them the customer is unhappy and to try harder. Anyway, my previous experiences with web development taught me that I needed to find a framework of some kind to bundle source code together into a clean set of HTML and javascript. I made my own framework esque thing for an ESP32 project that bundled everything together into a single index.html but thats a whole tangent. Anyway, I began looking for a framework that would provide me with the following:

1. Simplicity. As noted earlier I didn’t want to go crazy with the complexity of this site. I want to be able to understand the file structure and create new pages with ease.
2. Static hosting. This is a requirement if I want free hosting by GitHub pages (which I do). The server of a static website doesn’t run any of the website’s code itself, it’s sole purpose is to statically provide the website files to visitors for their browsers to run.
3. Pretty. While raw HTML solves the above requirements, I want my webpage to be sleek and satisfying. Preferably without needing to write any in-depth CSS.
4. Popular. When hiring someone to work on your project, you want them to know your tools. If I am orchestrating an agent to design this website there better be enough info out there such that it already knows how to use the framework.
5. Lightweight. This might not really matter. But coming from the firmware world where anything over a few tens of kilobytes is heavyweight, seeing many “lightweight” frameworks that generate a website that is tens of megabytes makes me cringe.

Previously, I used Jekyll as it is suggested by GitHub. However setting it up was a bit cumbersome and required Ruby amongst other dependencies I didn’t care for. To be honest, it is probably a great framework but I failed to harness its power and to cope with my failure I am going to chalk it down as not the right solution for my website.

I also at one point tried to explore Svelte which, like basically every framework, boasts being sleek and light weight. However it is targeted at writing sexy and dynamic user interfaces. But it was super complex for a lowly hardware dev who just wants to have a blog. And the spacial complexity of all the files needed to just create a simple website was just too much.

Another thing I have messed with in the past is Flask. Flask is a python based “micro-framework”. As I want simplicity and python is my go-to scripting language I really considered this. However while the actual creation of webpages is easy, I recalled struggling with making things pretty without diving deeper into custom javascript and CSS.

I began searching for something new, and stumbles across Astro. And to be honest, I was captivated just by their sexy landing page (I am a sucker for gradients and anything purple). My happiness with the pages aesthetics make me initially worry that there was heavy weight and complex trickery behind it. But a bit more research and it gave me Jekyll vibes but in a good way as it is markdown based and designed for blogs. Plus I could use UI elements from other frameworks (react, vue, svelte, etc) if I got tired of simplicity.

So, Astro it is! Now I saw a few options:

1. I do it myself. I read Astro docs, go through some tutorials, and start my website from scratch. I would learn Astro and improve my web dev skills, but I just want a website and to start creating content.
2. AI time! I could send off an agent with a description of my vision and have it set up everything. This is what I originally imagined doing, however I don’t pay for any AI services and worried it would be hard to get a quality setup. Plus in my experience AI tends to create bloat and complexity when it is completely unnecessary.
3. I pray to OSS. I may be able to find a generous soul who has an open source template that I vibe with as a starting ground.

Free as in Beer and Speech

To my delight, Astro has a template repository full of both paid and free templates made by the community. I loved combing through these for inspiration. There truly are so many talented designers out there. While looking at templates I decided that I wanted a website that gave terminal vibes. I wanted to create an atmosphere of retro, techie, and maybe hacker visuals that are reminiscent of staring at a recovery terminal for hours trying to figure out why your old laptop wasn’t booting once again. Something that would fit right in being displayed on a CyberDeck.

In Astro’s repository of themes, there are a few that are marked with the keyword terminal. I loved how Token leaned heavily into the terminal vibes with ASCII art and a black-and-white theme. Warp portfolio looks straight up like the modern Warp terminal. MacOS Terminal Portfolio is exactly what it sounds like, and allows visitors to talk to an AI through the terminal. However what really caught my eye was Spectre by Louis Escher. I truly am a sucker for purple, and Spectre is so simple and out of the box already is built to house a blog and portfolio of personal projects.

Louis Escher made Spectre free and open under the MIT license. This means it is free as in beer (I don’t pay a cent to use it) and free as in speech (I can do basically whatever I want with it). So I can use it as a starting point and make it my own. Honestly I could not change a bit of it and be quite happy, even though my original plan was to have AI build me exactly what I wanted. But this is for the best, as I can start with something that is already satisfying and have AI personalize it for me as I go.

Closing Thoughts

Being my first project post, I have yet to determine the format and differences between these and my blog posts. There is still a lot to be done and I hope that this website will evolve into a safe place for me to record my interests, share my learnings, and ultimately work on my skills as a writer and engineer.

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Inspiration Websites

• breq.dev
• msadowski.github.io
• token-template.deno.dev

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Project Info

• GitHub

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