This website is actually the second version of my personal portfolio. The first version lies in the dusty corners of my private GitHub repositories, never to see the light of day ever again. You see, when I find myself dissatisfied by something I create, I have the strange tendency to restart everything from scratch. And that's exactly what happened here.

The main reason why I like restarting things is because I feel that the final product is more consistent overall. When I create a project for the first time, a lot of it tends to be duct-taped together from a bunch of tutorials that I don't really understand, and as a result, there tends to be many weird inconsistencies in the coding style and weird workarounds for ideas that were clearly not meant to work with each other. That's what happened the first time I made this site.

The second time around, everything went a lot smoother. If I were to estimate, it probably took around a day or two's worth of hard work to create all of this (although the real timeline is more like a month because I'm lazy). Now that I actually understand how Next.js works, I found that I knew how to make pretty much everything. Even the hardest part, this blog, really only took like 2 hours to make. (Actually that's only including the code that's present right now. In actuality, I spent about 6 hours trying to resolve an issue involving importing MDX files before giving up and deciding to use next-mdx-remote. However, I have a much better understanding of how the blog pages are generated now, so I don't really mind.)

Overall, I feel like I've become a better programmer, not in how I can create projects, but in how I can understand the concepts behind the tools I use and how everything works together.