Hello World, Again

The first “website” I built was sometime around 2006/2007. It was for my clan in Ikariam.
That introduced me to HTML/CSS, but once the job was done, I did not really go further.

Following that, as a freshman Computer Engineering student, I built my personal website with large ambitions, hoping it would help me land internships. While I am not sure if it had any impact in me eventually getting some internships, it was an iterative process keeping it up to date as life progressed.

Figure 1: My old personal website

This was heavily inspired by Debarghya Das’ website, which I found to be very well designed and informative.
The old site is a static Bootstrap 3 build.

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Old Stack

• HTML + Bootstrap 3 for layout and components
• jQuery + Bootstrap JS for interactivity
• Font Awesome icons + Google Fonts (Montserrat)
• Custom CSS in a single stylesheet
• Fully static — no build tooling, frameworks, or bundlers

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Fair to say web design has changed a lot since then, certainly in ways that I think are for the better.
Now when you browse personal websites it is a lot more retro and minimalist, and I love that.

I wanted to learn some new tools and give my personal site a proper upgrade, so I decided to rebuild it from the ground up. Since I use the Gemini CLI a lot at work, it was also a great excuse to try Codex on something fun and personal.

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New Stack (2025)

• Astro 5.15 as the static site framework
• Tailwind CSS for styling (plus a small global stylesheet)
• MDX + Astro content collections for posts and frontmatter
• Vite + PostCSS/Autoprefixer for build tooling
• Minimal client-side JS (theme toggle only), otherwise fully static assets

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And most importantly, I actually added my blog!

I am hoping to write about my personal interests and experiences in tech, software development, and more.
Stay tuned for more posts to come!

- Mete