Building · 85%
Built by Tegar — Personal Website & Content Management System
A bilingual personal website and publishing system for documenting my work, experiments, writing, and the things I learn along the way.
Overview
- Status
- Building
- Progress
- 85%
- Difficulty
- Ambitious
- Started
- Aug 1, 2026
Stack & tools
Links
01 / MOTIVATION
Why I built this
I had wanted my own website for years—since I was still in university, and probably even earlier than that. I used to associate personal websites with people who genuinely understood their craft: people who had something to say, knew how they wanted to present it, and cared enough to build a space of their own. That idea also connected with something I enjoyed growing up. During elementary and middle school, I spent a lot of time writing on blogs and Wikipedia and experimenting with Blogspot themes. The writing was not particularly good—and some of it was honestly just copied from elsewhere—but I liked shaping the page, changing how it looked, and making the space feel like mine. Built by Tegar is a grown-up continuation of that curiosity: a place I own where I can document my work, experiments, writing, and how my thinking changes over time.
02 / QUESTION TO EXPLORE
What I wanted to understand or solve
Wanting a personal website turned out to be very different from actually finishing one. I had tried several times before. I bought domains, started building with WordPress, and later experimented with Webflow. None of those attempts made it to a proper release. Sometimes the initial excitement simply faded. Other times, the tools introduced enough technical and design constraints that the result no longer felt like the website I had imagined. Once that happened, it became easy to lose interest. When this version started taking shape, a different problem appeared: the website could always use one more feature, one more interaction, or one more small refinement. Building was no longer the biggest blocker. Knowing when to stop building—and sitting down to write the actual content—was.
03 / APPROACH
How I turned the idea into something testable
I treated the website as a product rather than a one-off portfolio page. I started with the kind of space I wanted to use myself: personal, editorial, slightly playful, but still structured enough to document professional work properly. From there, I built the visual system, information architecture, bilingual content model, and CMS together instead of treating them as separate layers. Codex helped turn ideas into working implementations quickly, which made it possible to explore interactions and technical details that had previously felt difficult to achieve with template-based tools. But the process still required constant product decisions: what belonged on the website, what should remain configurable, what needed to be simplified, and what was interesting but unnecessary. The result is a lightweight static website powered by Astro and Sanity, deployed through Cloudflare, with a standalone CMS, bilingual content, search, accessibility controls, interactive hero games, analytics, contact delivery, and supporting infrastructure for media and usage monitoring.
04 / FIELD NOTES
A wishlist that stayed around
This website did not begin as a sudden portfolio project. It came from an idea that had followed me for years.
I had always liked the thought of having a corner of the internet that was not dependent on a social platform, a company profile, or someone else’s content format. A place where the structure, tone, and presentation could reflect how I actually think.
Why the earlier attempts stopped
WordPress and Webflow were capable tools, but my earlier attempts never developed enough momentum to become something I wanted to maintain.
Part of the problem was discipline. Part of it was that every technical or visual limitation made the result feel less personal. Once the gap between the idea and the implementation became too wide, starting over felt easier than finishing.
What changed this time
Vibe coding with Codex shortened the distance between an idea and something I could test.
Instead of spending most of my energy figuring out how to make a specific interaction technically possible, I could spend more time deciding whether it belonged on the website at all. That changed the process from assembling a template into continuously shaping a product.
The actual hard part
The biggest challenge was not writing the code.
It was deciding what the website should say, documenting years of work responsibly, translating the content without losing its voice, and resisting the urge to delay release for another small feature.
At some point, shipping the website became less about whether it was complete and more about accepting that a personal website is supposed to keep evolving.
05 / LEARNING
This project reminded me that the hardest part of building is often not implementation, but making decisions and finishing.
AI-assisted coding can make development dramatically faster, but speed does not decide what deserves to be built. Product judgment, content, information architecture, and restraint still matter.
I also learned that a personal website is not merely a portfolio container. It is a living product: part archive, part publishing system, part playground, and part record of how its owner changes over time.
Most importantly, useful content cannot be replaced by polished interactions. The website only became meaningful once I stopped treating content as something to fill in later.
06 / NEXT
- Keep documenting new work and experiments without waiting for every story to feel perfect.
- Refine the Indonesian writing so it feels as natural as the English version.
- Continue improving accessibility, performance, and reading comfort.
- Use actual visitor behavior to decide which features deserve further investment.
- Keep the system maintainable and resist adding features that do not strengthen the content.
- Treat the website as a long-term archive rather than a project that needs to be “finished.”
LET'S TALK
Something worth talking about?
Product, systems, something you're building, or just an idea worth comparing notes on—feel free to reach out.