The Blog

I am currently procrastinating hard as it's chucking it down with rain outside, so instead of going to the gym i will write a little update on the site. I wanted a professional vibe for my site from the start, which I achieved with the legacy site, but these new upgrades make it a lot more techy, which is much more my style. The goal with this refactor was to enhance the experience for technical people, adding a terminal, and references you guys will understand. I made the old site still accessible by a secret command ran through the terminal, if you wish to go digging.

I also added byte, the little pet that hovers at the bottom of your screen. He falls asleep often. But he does provide useful tips from time to time.

This version of the site is much more what I envisioned when creating my site. That's all really. I will have an updated blog post about my leetcode assistant and leetcode journey very soon.

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This is my first time writing a blog so I have no idea what I am doing. I thought I'd write a little bit about the website me and Claude created, as I learnt a lot about automation and workflows in the process. I knew a little bit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript from my university course, but it was quite thin. The decision to use Claude to help me create this site was an obvious one. In terms of a return on investment for my time, learning HTML when LLMs were getting so good at it seemed like a waste of my time. There will be issues with the site for sure, but it serves its purpose for now, as a place for me to show of my projects, experience, and write my thoughts all in one. This site started off on the Claude free plan, but the real benefits for me came from when I switched to Claude code. I purchased the domain tomshephard.com for about £1.20 for the first year, although that hikes up to £20 in a years time (sorry future me.) It's hosted on Netlify, using their DNS service which was a learning experience in itself. The contact form at the bottom also links to Netlify which is cool. I essentially had a website that I would've paid hundreds for a few years ago, for £1.20, including a cool domain name. Netlify lets you auto deploy from a GitHub repository, which is one of the coolest features. I can get Claude to automatically push to my private repository, and Netlify will do all the work deploying, again saving me steps in deployment - everything can be done through Claude, while keeping backups and versioning on GitHub. It goes without saying, this includes things like blog posts, which I am trialling by literally just writing it within a Claude terminal, and having Claude commit it directly to GitHub and deploy to Netlify.

That's essentially how this site is set up. AI makes it trivial, and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing long term or not. However, I have always tried to use AI models in a way that makes my life easier, without just completely cutting my brain function off. To that end, every blog post is hand written, and future AI projects I do are aimed at making my learning, or my life easier in some way. As it stands I think it's a great tool - something we wouldn't have dreamed of a few years ago. I remember trying to code with ChatGPT in 2024 and how much of an awful time I was having. Claude in 2026 is a huge step up for sure, and I'd encourage others to experiment with automation and deployment of their own site within Claude.

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