johnvw.dev

About This Project

This is my personal portfolio website, built with Next.js and TypeScript. It showcases my work, blog posts, and more.

This was my first big dive into truly vibe coding.

Going into 2026, I wanted to change some things. I had been feeling the pull to write more and more. I'd even started writing more in 2025, but not consistently.

At the turn of the year, I set some goals to change that. I set goals to write more. But my writing needed somewhere to live.

I had an old blog, but the writing there was never consistent.

So, I wanted to make something new. A fresh place for my thoughts especially with how much the landscape had changed with AI.

So, I set to making this site.

I sat down with Visual Studio Code with my premium copilot license giving me access to the latest and greatest models.

And I started chatting.

I started with describing what I wanted. A personal site which was primarily a blog. Static content. React.

And I let it go from there.

It spun up a Next.js app. I was fine with that.

It chose Tailwind CSS. I'd heard good things, do sure.

We settled on markdown for the blog articles. Works for me!

I gave it some colors I liked and we made them work.

Before I knew it, I had a functioning site that I could deploy to my hosting platform.

Was it complete? Nope. And it's still not.

But did it work? Yep.

Did it make sense? Yep.

Did it meet my needs Yep.

I've enhanced it since then. Beefed up the security and added more features. But the main site is still basically as it was.

I wasn't opinionated on the architecture. I challenged it with some choices, but the AI was able to explain many things resonably.

So, we went with it. And I'm happy with the result.

Let me tell you what, though: having worked with AI tools on enterprise software, I was positively blown away at how quick and easy it was to build a simple site.

Enterprise software is not that way (most of the time).

For the first time, I really felt the magic of these tools.

And I wanted more.

Now I build things more often. Simple sites are easy. AI eats those up and spits them out all day. But more complicated things take a lot more planning and guidance.

But vibe coding is real. It's here. And it's magical.