Building the Site
The meta-thread — designing, building, and shipping andrewvoirol.com. Micro-interactions, finding a voice, and the content pipeline that makes it all work.
Building a portfolio site is its own project. This thread captures the decisions, experiments, and infrastructure that turned a blank Next.js app into a living workshop — from jelly-physics dark mode toggles to the three-tier atomic content model that generates this very page.
Timeline
Added a theme toggle to the site today. It's got a spring animation on the knob, twinkling stars in the dark mode track, and sun rays that rotate in. The real engineering was underneath — ThemeProvider with localStorage persistence, anti-FOUC inline script, and a custom event system so the globe canvas can pick up theme changes without re-mounting. The animation is fun but the architecture is the part I'm proud of.
Rewrote my own site copy because my AI told me I sound like LinkedIn. Replaced every 'intersection of' with something a human would actually say. Added 'vibe coder' to my identity line. Replaced emoji placeholders with animated SVGs. Introduced workshop-style borders that are intentionally imperfect — dashes that fall short, grids that aren't quite grids. The whole point is that the site should feel like a builder's workshop, not a corporate portfolio. Turns out the hardest part of building in public is sounding like yourself. The second hardest part is accepting that 'imperfect on purpose' is a real design decision and not laziness.
Rebuilt the content architecture from the ground up — log entries are now the only thing I write, and everything else composes from them. Thread pages render entries in expandable accordions. Project pages show a "How This Got Built" provenance section. The same MDX renders identically whether you're reading a standalone log entry, expanding it inside a thread timeline, or seeing it in a project's build history.
Along the way, fixed three production bugs that had been hiding: tables and headings had zero CSS styling site-wide, the ScoreBadge component showed "NaN%" on the Gemma 4 page because MDX doesn't pass numeric JSX props correctly, and the Edge Lab log entry was parented to the wrong thread. Cleaned up the content relationships, documented the atomic model, and built the publishing skill that generated this very entry.