Every year around the holidays I do some tinkering with my personal websites.

This year I simplified my www.matthewcanderson.com site, making it more durable and requiring less maintenance. I opted for HTML+CSS and a custom little build script to convert a now.md file to an html page. I’m happy with the result.

This kind of update in previous years (even last year using GHCP) would have taken a couple of days to go through planning and multiple iterations. This year things were different in the best way.

For the first step in my process this year, I used ChatGPT to riff on my ideas and formulate them into something actionable and start stubbing things out. All-in about 45 minutes.

For the next step I used GitHub Copilot to iterate 4 or 5 times to progress from MVP to final site. All-in this step took ~2 hours.

This is a massive improvement! These kind of ideas that I have usually end up sapping time and energy from several days throughout the holidays. I’d guess 5 hours of thinking time (debating myself, offering new ideas, starting over, then revisiting) and 10 hours of hands-on tech.

Ripples

Then the rub–the new site links to blog.matthewcanderson.com which is a Hugo site, which makes sense for a blog, but now navigating to the blog looks just different enough that I wanted to modify the theme.

I turned to GitHub Copilot in Plan mode, asking for what updates to make and included the full text of my style.css file. It took a minute or so and responded with the right updates. Then I asked Agent mode to create a branch and make said updates (focusing on colors, leaving fonts and spacing as-is, since I like the bear blog minimal theme aesthetic). A couple of minutes later, I had my updated branch that I could preview…it looked great!

I then asked for Copilot to create a pull request. It pushed the changes and gave me a clickable link to start the pull request (or offered to start it via CLI, but I chose the link).

From there, Netlify created a deploy preview that I could click to view.

It looked just how I wanted it to, so I merged the PR and Netlify took care of the rest.

In the end

From concept to completion this took less than a day, with breaks for family time, meal prep, and run club. In past years this would have stretched out over days if not weeks to get to “done”. Also, I ended up with a higher quality end product that I’m very happy with (a somewhat foreign feeling with most of these holiday-time updates).

I was also able to simplify my overall codebase for my main profile site, reducing from 7,992 lines of code in the original site to 539 in the new site.

Impact
⬇️ Total hours spent (15 to 3)
⬇️ Project cycle time (1-week plus to less than a day)
⬇️ Resulting complexity (significantly less code, less tech debt)
⬆️ Personal happiness/satisfaction (this isn’t looming over me for days)
⬆️ Energy left to write about it (no willpower required)