"This website is being recorded for quality assurance purposes" See the live analytics data from this website Rybbit.io is a privacy respecting website analysis platform that is free and open source to anyone willing to run it on their platform. At the moment, self hosting it gives you almost everything that the $13 a month tier does with the exception of the email related items (price list can be found here). It's exceptionally easy to get up and running, with a very intuitive and insightful display of information regarding how real users are interacting with your website. Since implementing rybbit on this site last week, I've seen traffic from 53 unique users from 11 different countries. Details you don't want to miss As I said above,...

This website has always been a means of exploring technology that I wasn't already familiar with. When it first came into being I was a college student who knew a lot about software theory, but knew next to nothing about how the internet functioned or how websites worked. Building a website from scratch provided an opportunity to get my hands dirty and learn a thing or two by doing rather than by reading. As a gainfully employed software engineer in 2026 I've been witness to a lot of hype around these tools. In just this month, big tech is cutting jobs (again), Anthropic is now considered a threat to national security by the current government, and almost everyone I've talked to is using these tools in some capacity on a daily basis....

Now that my degree is techinically done (more on that here), I had the free time to catch up on my project backlog. After the last site refactor utilizing PHP, I realized that I was in way too deep for the scope of this site. This is supposed to be a small personal website to write notes to myself and others, not something that needs to be overly complicated. Similar to the previous rework, I set up some goalposts for myself to work towards: Easy to write and update blog posts Written from scratch (mostly) "Just works" Looks and feels modern Keep page size and bloat to a minimum Instead of using a language like PHP that dynamically renders a markdown page each time a new page is accessed on the site, I realized that it would be much...