Nick White

Why This Site?

This page is a collection of motivations, inspirations, tools, and resources I've found helpful in building this site.

As the site grows, this page should grow with it, so I'll just put what I can remember here and add to it over time.

Last updated: 2025-11-21

Motivations

I wanted to build this particular website because I didn't have a place to send people that was specific to my software engineer identity.

What is my software engineer identity?

I'm still trying to understand it myself, but it's starting to manifest as a minimalistic, quality-focused, web developer who wants to engage more with like-minded devs.

What motivated me to build a website from scratch?

I have spent so much time learning and working with frontend frameworks, backend frameworks, and cloud hosting platforms. Building a website from scratch with the least amount of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript then hosting it with a simple setup on a small server seemed like a fun challenge.

Frameworks and platforms take care of a lot of well known gotchas so that people can spend their time focusing on their products and services instead of coming up with solutions for long solved problems. This is great for moving fast and making impact. On the other hand, if you only use frameworks and platforms to build things, you'll never learn about why they exist in the first place. Since this my personal website, I can afford to learn things the hard way. The slow way. The painful way.

The hope is that building from scratch with only the basics will make me faster and more effective at building for web.

What keeps me excited about this potentially slow and painful process is that because I have a website built with only code that I've written myself, I feel like I have more control over it than I usually do.

Endless potential!

Inspirations

Tools

Hosting

  • Hetzner - I started with the smallest VPS I could and as of writing this, it's having no trouble serving what little I have to the few who visit it.
  • Caddy - Caddy is the HTTP server I went with. I like its simple Caddyfile configuration format.

Coding

  • GitHub - Version control makes everything better. My git repository for this site is on GitHub and I'm using GitHub Actions to deploy the site when I push to the main branch.
  • VS Code - I'm currently using VS Code as my code editor. It's snappy, has a lot of good extensions, and works well as an IDE.

Resources

  • Plain Vanilla - As mentioned above, I drew a lot of inspiration from Joeri's guide to web development from scratch. I referenced the Plain Vanilla guide many times while building this website.
  • Modern Font Stacks - A collection of font rules that leverage standard built-in fonts. This is a simple and creative way to eliminate the need for third party fonts.
  • vps-github-actions-auto-deploy - A short guide for setting up automated deployment with GitHub Actions. I forked the repository and added my changes to document my process.
  • But, how do I actually set up and secure a new VPS (on Hetzner)? - Based on this video, Dominik Hofer wrote a quick guide on how to set up a secure VPS from the start.
  • Trunk-based development - Atlassian's article on trunk-based development describes the git workflow I've landed on. I initially started with Gitflow because I've used that in the past for corporate projects but that proved to be too heavy-handed for my little site with one contributor.

That's It!

At least, that's all I can think of for now.

Thanks for reading!