New website!

My previous website was built using Nuxt Content CMS with Vue, where it was edited via git and pre-compiled and auto-pushed to Netlify, which wasn't the most elegent of workflows. At work I've been building lots of sites via Django Wagtail on Docker, which I feel is a much more robust and customisable stack.

So I've rebuilt my website in Django/Wagtail/Tailwind/Docker stack, embracing Claude Code all the way (which allowed me to get to the same point in a matter of minutes, which took hours and hours in the previous hand-coded stack).

I wanted to make it a bit more creative than a vanilla Tailwind blog, reflecting my 8bit youth, so I worked with Claude Code to implement an ASCII plasma background, which creates a big matrix of floats using a combination of sinewaves to create plasma waves across the grid (with values from 0.0 -> 1.0) this is then translated into an ASCII value, using a pre-defined character map, with a dollop of dithering thrown in.

One of the benefits of Claude Code is fixing the annoying little tweaks, which would normally take a lot of time.

This has enabled me to rapidly meet one of my other goals for this website - a perfect Lighthouse score! 🎉

Using Claude Code means I can easily set the site up on a Google Cloud VM, without having to remember all the syntax, just using gcloud cli, no need for clunky MCPs!

As with using any LLM coding tool, you need to know how to do it manually, to ensure good supervision.

For example, to clear the cache on the VM I just ask it in plain English, and quickly scan the command before execution, to check it's not doing anything it shouldn't: