Building a personal site from scratch, 4 years later

In the last four years, I’ve significantly grown in my ability and confidence to start a site from scratch, and a perfect reflection of this is in the evolution of my personal site. I initially had lots of trouble getting started, in large part due to my lack of design skills. I’m hoping that by sharing the progress I have made, others will be inspired to pursue projects that they think are out of their reach.

2012–11–12: Buying a domain

The first step: I bought the domain names for golmansax.com and holmangao.com. This was going to happen.

2013–11–07: The “MVP”

Almost a year passed before I did anything. But eventually, I produced something and made it public. It was a big moment.

Sometime after I launched my site, a casual conversation with my boss motivated me to work harder on it. We were assessing the candidacy a UI/UX engineer, and the dialogue went something like:

• My boss: “Why would we hire a UI/UX engineer with an ugly site?”
• Me: “Well, my site is pretty basic.”
• My boss: “Yeah, but you weren’t hired for UI/UX.”
• Oof.

I became determined to produce a site that I would be proud to show off.

2014–12–01: Adding content and a font

Around this time, I started going through HackDesign articles, and I slowly applied what I learned (e.g. fonts are important) to the site. In addition, whenever I thought of something I wanted to share, I added it to the site.

2015–03–20: Color!

Sometimes small changes make a huge difference. Adding color was one such change.

2015–05–24: Project thumbnails

A day before a hackathon, I spent most of the night adding thumbnails to my projects, in case anyone visited my portfolio. It probably wasn‘t the smartest idea to stay up late the day before a hackathon, but it definitely added sparkle to my site.

2016–08–26: Portrait and bio

A friend suggested that I add a portrait and a bio. Great idea.