Why I Built This Site

Hi, I’m Daniel. Thanks for stopping by.

I’m a CS student at UCLA, and I’m always looking for fresh ideas and new projects to work on. This site is where I’m going to document that journey — the things I’m learning, the stuff I’m building, and maybe a little bit of music production along the way.

A little about the tech

Now for some of the more technical stuff. It might be boring to you, but I think it’s interesting to know.

The site is built with Astro, which is a static site generator that ships practically zero JavaScript by default and only hydrates the bits that actually need to be interactive. Blog posts (including this one!) are just plain Markdown files in a folder, which means writing a new post is as simple as creating a .md file and pushing to GitHub.

Speaking of GitHub — the whole thing is deployed via GitHub Pages with a tiny Actions workflow. Every time I push to main, the site rebuilds and redeploys automatically. Free hosting, no server to babysit, no database to worry about. I love it.

The fun part

I wanted this site to be more than just another portfolio with a photo, a bio, and a list of projects. I wanted you to have a bit of fun while you were here.

So I built a points system. You earn points as you explore — visiting pages, finding things, clicking on things you probably shouldn’t. Once you have enough, you can head to the shop and spend them on upgrades like dark mode, a matrix rain background, or a secret page that’s locked behind a paywall of attention.

This was easily the most fun part of the whole build. It gave me an excuse to stretch my creativity while learning a lot of the small, finicky details of web development that you don’t normally touch when you’re just making a landing page.

Oh, and the cat

If you haven’t noticed yet, there’s a cute little cat in the bottom-left corner of your screen. You can click it for points. You can drag it around. You can also drop it, which I’m told is a bit mean, but it always walks itself home.

There’s also a cosmetics page where you can dress it up with hats, glasses, capes, and more. Make the cat your own.

The resume, but alive

Instead of slapping a static PDF on the site and calling it a day, I turned my resume into an interactive vertical timeline. You can filter it by category, hover on any entry to expand the details, and poke around at your own pace. The PDF is still there if you want it — but I think this version is way more fun to read.

What’s next

There’s so much more I want to add here. More projects, more writeups, more posts about the things I’m figuring out as I go. This site will grow with me.

Stay tuned. And in the meantime — go pet the cat.