Built in a day

6 April 2026

This site went from zero to deployed in under 24 hours. I'm not a developer — I'm a marketing and commercial lead who builds things on the side. Here's what that process actually looked like.

The decision

I could have used a website builder. Squarespace, Webflow, Framer — all fine options. I chose not to for one reason: I wanted to own it fully and run it cheaply, with a writing section I control without paying a monthly CMS fee. That's it. The decision was commercial, not technical.

What it cost in time

Under a day for the initial build. The technical setup went fast. What actually took time was content: rewriting the work history three times, figuring out what to say in the bio, deciding what projects to include and how to frame them. The decisions were the work. The implementation followed.

What changed

Two years ago this project would have required hiring a developer or spending weeks learning to do it myself. Neither was appealing. What's different now is that AI handles the implementation if you handle the decisions — and those aren't the same skill.

If you know what you want — what the site should say, who it's for, what impression it should leave — you can ship something real without a technical background. The judgment part hasn't changed. The building part got much faster.

Why this matters beyond personal websites

The same shift applies to internal tools, prototypes, and side projects. If you've had an idea sitting on a "we'd need a developer for that" shelf, it might be worth reconsidering. The bottleneck moved.