This website · Built July 2026

Built to be rebuilt.

A personal site is never finished. It changes every time its owner does. This version is the engineering era, and this page is the tour: what I decided while building it, and what those decisions say about how I work. Check the repo

HTML · CSS · Git · GitHub · Netlify · CI/CD · AI-assisted development · Claude

KISS

My favorite engineering rule

  • Right now, this website only has 3 pages, so I've opted to build it with basic HTML and CSS.
  • The trade-off is some copy-paste: each page repeats the same header and nav. If and when it grows, I can reconsider using a JavaScript framework to keep it manageable.

Design tokens and dark mode for free

One palette, two themes

  • Every color on the site is a CSS custom property at the top of the stylesheet.
  • Dark mode just redefines the same names under prefers-color-scheme: dark, with a data-theme attribute override that wins if it's ever set.
  • It also means I can swap the whole palette whenever I want, and knowing me, that'll probably be next week.

Built with the help of Claude

My pair programmer

  • I built this site with Claude: I set the direction, make the decisions, and nothing ships until I've read it.
  • I like to think of AI as a very eager junior employee: great for executing fast, but still requiring constant supervision.

Netlify CI/CD

GitHub → Netlify, on every push

  • The source lives in a public GitHub repo. Pushing to main triggers a Netlify deploy automatically.
  • Fun fact: At Camden, we used to literally copy and paste files from our local to the production server. Once I learned how to enable Azure Pipelines there, I never looked back.
Read this far?

Then you've seen how I work. If that's what your team needs, my inbox is open.

hey@rachelvmadrigal.com