Alex Kruckenberg

Updating My Site

7-25-26

It's been about 3 years since I built the first version of my porfolio website. At the time, I had just been laid off from a job as a junior frontend software engineer, and I hadn't built a portfolio before then. It was pretty eye-opening to realize how little I knew about the basics of web development, having only worked in a pre-existing codebase. I remember spending many hours poring over the NextJS documentation and reading many CSS StackOverflow posts in order to implement what I would now consider to be pretty trivial features.

Looking back now, after building a few more projects and gaining a deeper understanding of web design, I'm glad I went through the struggle of learning those skills from scratch.

This post wasn't supposed to be about AI, but I feel like I can't talk about my journey without addressing it. At this point, I consider myself to be largely pessimistic towards LLM technology. There are a lot of reasons I'm not fond of it - its environmental and societal impacts to start - but in this context, I look at its impact on human intelligence and I worry.

In my experience, the best things in life come from persistence and hard work. AI cheats us of both. I've used it on a handful of my recent projects, and looking back, I wish I hadn't. I would rather have gone through the effort of learning to create those features on my own. Especially as someone still early in my coding career, I'm trying to steer clear of it as much as I can.

And that's not to say that I don't think it has useful applications. I do. I think I'd be foolish to pretend that LLMs are useless. I admit that I have appreciated, at times, the way they can search for answers to tough documentation questions, or untangle sticky bugs. But when I look at the blocks of AI-generated code that pepper some of my personal projects, I think about the lessons I could have learned, and the skills I could have developed, but didn't.

So when I decided to redo this site, I decided I'd do it all myself, without a coding assistant. Frankly, it's been a joy to work on, and I think that's something that a lot of programmers are learning after spending so much time letting agents do their work for them. Writing code is fun. Solving problems is fun. I learned to do this for a reason: because I like doing it, and I'm good at it. Why should I let an LLM take that feeling away from me?

It was hard to let go of my old design. I spent hours making the background assets, and I will miss the little sleeping fox that you can see on the desktop version. But now that I'm applying for internships and entry-level data science positions, I made the tough choice to design a site that better serves me as a professional. (But of course I couldn't resist adding in a little of my personality with the fox logo ;) )

Here are the upgrades I implemented for the redesign:

A lot has changed in the past 3 years, and I hope my new site is a demonstration of everything I've learned in that time. Here's to the future and to everything I have yet to learn!