Building Blake.pm: Astro, AI, and a Little Too Much Space Debris

I’ve owned blake.pm for a long time.

Over the years, I’ve had a few different ideas about what it could be. Mostly, it has been some variation of a personal landing page, an unfinished blog, or another project I enjoyed tinkering with more than I enjoyed finishing.

This time, I wanted to actually build something I would keep.

Starting With Someone Else’s Good Idea

I didn’t start with a blank screen. I got interested in the idea of a static site using free services pulling from a GitHub repo, and for reasons I don’t really remember, I chose Astro.

I found the theme Astro Sphere created by Mark Horn, and immediately liked it. It was simple, dark, quiet, and just a little bit spacey. It had personality without looking like someone had tried very hard to give it personality.

That seemed like a good place to start, but I really did want to try and make it more mine.

Things Escalated

The original had the curvature of, I assume, a planet as well as stars, some twinkling and shooting. I started trying to come up with how to make it unique and thought of adding the aurora borealis. I spent a lot of time going back and forth with this, trying to get it right. Sometimes it was too subtle. Sometimes it did not look like an aurora. Eventually, it landed in a place that I liked.

At some point, I thought, rather than light mode and dark mode, what if I had a few themes? That eventually grew into lining up themes with planets’ colors, and logically, I had to at least represent all the planets. Once I realized I did not have a pure black, it became logical to create Sagittarius A*.

I added a tumbling asteroid, a satellite, and an astronaut. Then came the Debris Lab, where you can see various objects floating around the homepage.

I added an easter egg and decided it was too unlikely to ever get seen, so I introduced an option to call it. I had to work in Pluto.

The Social page idea hit me, and I must say, I was instantly in love with the idea. My social sites (which really aren’t even active) became an orbit instead of a list of links.

None of this was in the requirements. There were no requirements. Things just kind of take on a new life when the canvas is blank and there’s a little help to accelerate the realization of creativity.

Somewhere along the way, the site stopped feeling like Astro Sphere with my content in it and started feeling like mine. The original theme is still visible in its DNA, and I want to keep credit for that starting point where it belongs. But I also like how far the experiment has wandered.

Building a Website With AI

There’s another part of this project that made it particularly interesting to me: I built it with AI.

I have been trying to stay at the forefront of AI products. I’ve done a lot with using AI products on the business side and around the infrastructure supporting AI. But in my current role, there’s simply no space for this kind of product-focused approach to building something with a coding agent.

I didn’t type “build me a personal website” into a prompt and wait for a finished product to fall out. The process looked much more like software development than magic.

I think about what I want. I explain it primarily via a chat interface that doesn’t eat into my token consumption. That discussion drives some of the build strategy and even helps with effective prompting for the coding agent. I prompt an agent, which looks at the code, reports back, and makes changes. I review those changes. We iterate. We refine. We undo. We ship.

If you pay any attention to this space, nothing here is shocking. I pay close attention to this space. I have major concerns about unchecked AI-driven application development by non-technical business units without proper governance to ensure safety.

But even with me staying dialed in, it’s pretty amazing how much of a force multiplier it was to do this.

This was not my first time starting a deployment of an Astro site, but my previous attempts did not take off. My personal life stays quite busy. Time spent working on building a website that almost no one will ever look at can feel a little wasteful. I feel confident that everything I did with AI, I could have done on my own, but at what cost?

Keeping the Writing Part Simple

For all the unnecessary space debris, I wanted the underlying site to remain relatively simple.

Astro was a good fit for that. Most of what you’re looking at can be generated as static pages, and the interactive pieces don’t require turning the whole thing into a large web application.

The site lives in GitHub and is hosted by Cloudflare.

I also wanted writing here to be easy.

I know myself well enough to realize that if publishing a post requires opening a code editor, creating the right file, remembering the front matter, and committing it to Git, I’m giving myself several opportunities to decide I’ll do it later.

”Later” is where personal blogs go to die.

So I added Keystatic as a visual editor. The content can still live with the site instead of disappearing into a hosted CMS, but I get a much friendlier interface for actually writing and maintaining it.

I’ve also added support for different kinds of posts. Not everything needs to be an article. There can be shorter notes, links, photos, and reviews.

The goal is to make the threshold for putting something here reasonably low. Whether that results in me actually writing more remains an experiment.

Still a Work in Progress

There are parts of the site I’m probably going to change.

There are features I haven’t built yet. There are almost certainly things I’ve built that I’ll eventually decide were ridiculous and remove.

There may also be more space debris. I make no promises.

That’s part of why I wanted my own site again.

The web I grew up with had a lot of places that existed simply because somebody wanted to make them. They didn’t all need a business model, a growth strategy, or an algorithm deciding what belonged on the front page.

Sometimes somebody made a weird little corner of the Internet and kept messing with it.

I like that.

So that’s what blake.pm is. It’s a place for me to write, but it’s also a place for me to build. The website itself is part of the hobby.

If you’re interested in the more straightforward version of what’s running underneath all of this, I’ve put that on the About the Site page. The source is also available on GitHub.

-B