Opening the workshop

I wanted a place that feels closer to a workshop than a portfolio.

A portfolio usually asks: what have you finished? A workshop asks a more interesting question: what are you exploring, what are you learning, and why?

That is the energy I want this site to have. I want a place for ideas that are more useful than another saved bookmark, but not so polished that every note has to pretend to be final.

AI-assisted development made that feel more possible again. It is easier now to move from “I should look into that someday” to a small working experiment while the curiosity is still fresh. That changes the weight of building. The code still matters, but it is not the whole story.

The part I want to preserve is not only what I built. It is why I built it, what I was trying to understand, what surprised me, and what I learned from the process. That is why this site has two connected spaces.

The blog is where I slow things down. If I keep coming back to a question, a tool, or a pattern, writing gives me a way to make it clearer. It is the place for motivation, tradeoffs, lessons, and the parts that code does not explain.

The lab is the more concrete side. Some things are easier to understand when they run somewhere real. A small demo can reveal constraints that a paragraph would hide. Sometimes the useful part is not the finished result, but the edge where something almost works and the next question becomes obvious.

That is also how I want to write about this site itself. This post is about the reason for the workshop. The implementation belongs in the lab: how the site uses Next.js App Router, generic slug routes, repo-owned MDX, and TSX demos to keep the technical side visible.

This is only the starting point. The site, the split between blog and lab, and the way I write about experiments will change as I use it. That is part of the point: I want the workshop to evolve with what I learn instead of pretending the structure was obvious from day one.

The goal is to keep following curiosity, and to leave enough of a trail that it might help someone else (or future me) follow theirs too.