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aidan

Hello from the new site

2 min read
  • meta
  • nextjs
  • vercel

I rebuilt this site. Same domain, completely different bones underneath.

The old version lived on AWS and had the architecture of a SaaS product I was never going to ship. A CloudFront distribution. An S3 bucket. A Lambda I'd forgotten about. A bill I'd remember every month. For a personal site that updates twice a year, it was overkill in a way that felt slightly embarrassing.

So I tore it down and built this — Next.js on Vercel, MDX for posts, zero infrastructure I have to think about.

What's different

  • Glass surfaces over an aurora-gradient background instead of the flat dark theme. More fun. More me.
  • A pixel-art avatar that bobs gently in the hero. The old site had a stock circle.
  • A $ whoami terminal flourish because I like that sort of thing.
  • MDX posts so I can drop a React component into a blog post if I feel like it.
  • GitHub-pinned repos pulled at build time — projects update themselves now.

What's the same

The blog is still where I'll write down the things I figure out. The certifications page is still a place to keep my paperwork. The security writeups page is new-ish, and I'll fill it in as I publish things worth reading.

If you used to bookmark anything on the old domain, the URLs should still resolve. Anything that doesn't, ping me.

// new stack, tl;dr
const stack = {
  framework: 'Next.js 15',
  styling: 'Tailwind + glass + scanlines',
  content: 'MDX in /content',
  hosting: 'Vercel',
  cost: '$0/month',
}

Talk soon.