Why I rebuilt this site from scratch
Welcome to the new sonhp.dev. If the site looks different from the last time you stopped by, that’s because it is: I tore the old template down to the frame and rebuilt everything, design to deployment, as one solo project from scratch.
Why the rebuild
I’ve spent eight-plus years building things for other people: e-commerce on Shopify, logistics platforms, LLM-powered features. Somewhere in there the site I used to point people at became the thing I was least proud of. A personal site should be proof of how you build, not a placeholder that contradicts it.
So this is version two. Hand-built, no template theme, shipped the way I ship everything else: decide, build, review, ship.
What the site runs on
- Astro for the static site and per-route API endpoints
- Tailwind CSS v4 with a small set of design tokens doing all the work
- Cloudflare Workers for hosting
- A neobrutalist design system: borders, hard shadows, no imagery, light mode only for now
Every page you can click is the same system: the same tokens, the same press-on-hover behaviour, the same two typefaces.
What I’ll write about
Notes from building alone across the whole stack: PHP and Laravel, Node.js and NestJS, React frontends, AWS infrastructure, and the LLM features I’ve been shipping lately. Things I learned the hard way, small tools I end up reusing, and occasionally opinions I’ll probably revise.
No schedule, no filler. When something’s worth writing down, it’ll land here.