Hello jessechen.net my old friend...

I've come to redesign you again.

May 2010, this website was forged in the fires of Adobe Dreamweaver and PHP. I cringe now looking back at it. But hey - it was a different time, I didn't know any web development then (nor design skills) and was just a student in college building random shit for fun.

June 2021, one decade later. Alas, I still have not managed to nab the jessechen.com domain. *sets reminder for June 2024* Did that guy ever recover from his stomach virus?

Earth is starting to heal from COVID-19, and I am trying to figure out another hobby I can take on while I wait a few more months for life to resume. Over the last year, I've learned to play mediocre piano again (right-brain ⬆️), +25lbs of muscle/fat from working out (body ⬆️), and now have decided to see whether I can still code (left-brain ⬆️). I have to complete the trifecta!

Now you see - since my last blog post that went viral in 2013, I've been working fulltime at a company called Facebook. I've been kind of busy there and haven't done a good job updating this site. Let's see if we can fix that..

But going back to the original topic, why not try and code for fun instead of just for work? Let's bring back that feeling of building random shit for fun again. TL;DR: I haven't coded the past 5 years, I honestly thought I might've forgotten how to entirely. I took that personally - so I decided to redesign my website.

And here it is! What do you think? Happy to go into more detail about my thoughts about webdev in 2021 vs webdev in 2010. This redesign was a great learning experience for me.

Out with Wordpress and PHP, in with Next.js, Chakra UI, and MDX. The best thing about all of this...is that it's all open source. If you're curious about the source code powering this website, check out my repo on GitHub.

Scroll down to the bottom of my website, my favorite part is the little SHA link that shows you the latest commit I pushed 🙃

And the vision that was planted in my brain..is now implemented in my domain