Be honest about your personal site. It's a half-finished Next.js repo from eighteen months ago. The landing animation works, the projects section is three placeholder cards, and the about page still says "coming soon." You've redesigned it twice in your head and zero times in production. Every few months you open the repo, look at it, and close it.
I'm not judging. I write code for a living, and I did exactly this for years. The thing nobody admits is that a personal site is the perfect procrastination object for a developer. It's technically "work," it's never urgent, and there's always one more refactor between you and shipping it. So it just sits there, forever at 70%.
Meanwhile, the actual job, showing people what you've built, doesn't get done. Someone asks what you work on and you send them your GitHub, which is just code with no context, or your LinkedIn, which is a wall of job titles nobody reads. The one place that's supposed to show your work is the one place you never finished.
Here's what I eventually figured out: building the site was never the goal. Showing the work was the goal. I'd confused the two for about a decade.
So I built Aksara, and the core decision was to remove every part that turns "show my work" back into "build a website." That mostly meant removing choices.
One template. No customization. No font picker, no theme gallery, no layout system, no fifty draggable blocks. Monochrome, whitespace, hairline borders, rounded corners. This sounds restrictive and it's the opposite. The reason your own site never shipped isn't that you lacked options, it's that every option was a decision you could defer, and you deferred all of them. Take the decisions away and the page actually gets made. There's no "now design it" step lying in wait, because the design is already done and it's not yours to break.
I think handing users a blank canvas is mostly how a tool dodges responsibility. "We gave you the knobs, not our fault it looks bad." But if pages built with my thing look bad, nobody shares them, and a tool whose pages nobody shares is dead. So the design isn't a feature you opt into. It's the product, and it's not optional.
Projects first, no resume. Your work sits at the top. There's no experience section unless you go out of your way to add one. A student with three real projects shouldn't land on a page that looks empty next to someone's twenty years of job titles. Your title isn't your work. The work is your work.
Designed empty states. An unfinished page doesn't look broken; it looks intentional, dashed slots that say drop an image here instead of sad gaps. That matters because the half-finished state is exactly where you bailed on your own site. Here there's nothing to bail from.
I'll be straight about the tradeoff. If you genuinely want a hand-built site with a custom font and a scroll-jacking hero, you should build it, that's a real thing and it's not what this is. What you give up is total control. What you get back is a page that exists, today, instead of a repo that will hit 70% and stop. For most of us that trade is obviously correct, we just don't admit it.
Here's mine: https://aksara.so/fabio
If you think the one-template call is wrong, or you're the rare person who actually finished their personal site, I want to hear it. That's the conversation I'm here for, this is a hypothesis after all.
Top comments (1)
Hey Fabio,
I'm really new to this community, so don't mind me if I'm missing something. But aren't there already platforms or websites for this? Maybe "boilerplate" is a better word for what I'm thinking.
If we dig a little deeper, there are already plenty of boilerplates and services that let people host personal websites. For example, GitHub Pages, Vercel, and similar platforms.
That said, your site looks good and feels nice to use. I just had a suggestion.
What if you made the people using your website a bigger part of it? Maybe create a section where users can submit their work, templates, or personal sites, and then other users can browse, use, or build on those templates. It could create more of a community around the platform instead of it being just a tool.
Again, it's just a suggestion from someone new here, but I think something like that could make users feel more involved and give people a reason to keep coming back.