This page was created using Jekyll based on the al-folio theme. I’ve never been a fan of using website templates because it always felt hard to customize the website to my liking. Instead, I remade the same website by 1. learning Jekyll, 2. ripping out chunks of code from the original repository I wanted to keep, and 3. customizing some pages to fit my preferences.

Why would anyone do this instead of just modifying the original repository? First, the original repository had a lot of bells and whistles, which made the codebase hard to navigate and understand. I also really only wanted the bare minimum features and keep the codebase small. Lastly, it’s a great learning excerise. I’m terrible at design so I wouldn’t even dare designing my own website, but it’s much easier to make changes now that I mostly know how the code works!