About This Site - Development Process

The “next chapter” of my life includes more than woodworking. Building on my career in IT, I’m continuing to explore and learn new things. This website is an example of that. My day-to-day job over the last few years required I spend more time addressing “situations” than actual hands-on coding. Hence, I got a little rusty at the coding side of it.

So when it came time to address the question from family, friends, and colleagues: “Where can I go to see some pictures of your work?”, I looked at the options. As I was looking more and more at AI to address the needs of Solution Architects, a question popped into my head: “Just how helpful can AI be in the creation of a website when I’ve either never done it before or very ‘rusty’?”.

What you see here is the initial result. Over a two-week period, I spent time with my 'advisor', Google Gemini, and started prompting it for what I was looking for. That provided the seed of the code. Then, I pivoted to use Google Gemini Code Assist in Visual Studio to tweak the initial code to get it working and add features. Needless to say, I will continue to iterate on this site, as it does provide a learning platform for continued investigation.

I must say it was a learning experience on many fronts. I am working to share this journey in more detail with you in the form of blog posts that I’m working on. As they say, there is nothing like actually doing something to really learn, and I do have quite a number of observations that I think may be interesting.

Stay tuned for that.

-Gary