We're so back, baby!

I made my first website when I was in third grade, and I've maintained some sort of web presence since that first version of Tim's World. Past experience shows that this website changes whenever I feel like my identity has changed, and this change is no different.

The first commit for this iteration of my website was on July 3, 2018. Since then, I've made almost no effort to maintain it. Prior to last week, this blog was running Ruby 2.7 and Rails 5.1 on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS VPS with exactly zero unit test coverage. Every time I went to publish a change to the site, I had to SSH into the server, upload the file, then restart the server from the command line like an animal!

I had three goals in mind back in 2018: keep the design simple, produce as tiny of an environmental footprint as possible, and make it easy to share things that mean something to me.

Here in 2026, the goals are similar, but I feel more focused: I want to build a digital garden. A library for me to wander through, get lost, and discover.

It's a subtle distinction from how I use my site today. My home page shows me my favorite photo (where my family and I are getting slimed at Nickelodeon Resort) as well as a random quote that inspires me. I have functionality to track my exercise progress. I have a hidden section that shows me a "this day in Untappd history", allowing me to look back on the fun places I've been and the delicious beers I've consumed.

Turning my site into a digital garden will keep a lot of that functionality, but make a stronger emphasis on the tags that I've judiciously applied to every quote, blog post, and linked list item.

Each tagged item represents an opinion that meant something to me at one point, but there isn't much cohesiveness to them. Also, it sucks to read through them with this specific design because all of the content is shoved into a single, 600px wide column.

Realizing this dream requires several substantial changes under the hood, and my first glance at the engine made my stomach churn. My first instinct was to burn this site to the ground and make a totally new one. I even vibe coded a few new CMSes thinking I might want a static site builder or something similar.

But it turns out with AI, it is pretty straight forward to simply upgrade this site to modern versions of Rails and build on the foundation that's been here for nearly a decade.

One of the goals on my about page is to get good with computers again. I used to love sitting down and figuring out how to do stuff on my machine. With tools like Claude Code and Codex, it's easier than ever to get back to experiencing that feeling of success after I made the computer do something exactly the way that I want it to.

Over the winter break, I architected out a plan to incrementally upgrade my site through every version of Rails since 5.1. This started with getting my codebase covered 100% with unit tests, then methodically upgrading each plugin, framework, and antiquated approach to building Rails apps. I even transitioned my database from MySQL to Postgres, and I'm able to now deploy my site using Kamal.

It can't be understated how easy this was for me to do. If this were a year ago, it would have taken me weeks to do. With Codex, it took me under 10 hours from start to finish. If I didn't have AI tools to help, I would simply have burned the site to the ground and started from scratch.

Now that I have a fully up-to-date, modern Rails application powering this site, I'm ready to run all sorts of small-scale experiments on here. I've already made many quality-of-life improvements on here, including making my tags easier to browse. For example, check out the things I've tagged with 'joy'! All the way at the bottom is a post about Weird Al that I completely forgot about.

Anyway, I'm jazzed that my site is feeling fresh and fun again. My head is buzzing with possibilities for how to share the things I love and present it in a fun, cohesive manner. And now that I have everything in a good place from a technical perspective, I'm ready to experiment with the design and make it feel like "2026 Tim."