How I built this site & plans for the future

Personal website update. An introduction to the blog, how this site was built, and what to expect in future!

Introduction about me#

Hello! Glad you visited my blog. I'm RoboMarchello. I've been creating games, physics simulations, software for about 6 years now.

Recently, I got accepted into Lodz University of Technology and I'm starting my Computer Science degree there this October (in 2 weeks)!

Why this website and how#

I've owned this domain for about 1.5 years now. Back then, I was learning a bit of web development and Flask for a personal website and a project called AlgoTracker.

But as time went by, I got busy with competitions and preparing for Ukrainian exams, so I never really got back to updating it. Here's how the old website looked:

It wasn't all that bad, but I wanted something more presentable. Once exams and other projects were out of the way, I decided to "vibe code" a fresh version while prepping for university math and physics. I'll be honest—this isn't how I normally like to work. I value having a deep understanding of what I build, plus learning C++ is currently my main priority. But since I desperately needed a working site, using AI felt like the right shortcut for this specific case.

The tool I used was Google AI Studio because of its generous free tier limits. (I also have a 1-year student offer, but I'm saving that for later!)

It will take really long to describe the whole process, but it was basically like this:

1. Get inspiration, envision the design and structure.
2. AI & me back and forth. I made probably around >100 iterations before getting to this result, and it's FAR from perfect
3. When finished with the design, I asked AI to create tools for me that would save DAYS of work inserting content on all the pages.
4. Put the content on the page with those tools.
5. Deploy on GitHub Pages

Building those custom tools turned out to be incredibly useful. In fact, I'm writing this exact post using one of them right now!

Right now I'm working on deploying all of this. I decided to use Claude Code to rewrite the backend and to clean up the AI Studio mess. First, I was disappointed because it consumed all five bucks without finishing even one request, so I topped it up with another $5, and it just barely finished. -$10, but actually the code is way better, which is just amazing. I've heard that the Claude subscription is a way better deal than the API pay-as-you-go model, but still, $20/month is just a little bit too expensive for my current needs.

Plans for the future#

As mentioned above, I'm starting university and it will be my main focus. My main personal goal right now is learning C++. I'll definitely continue updating this website and posting life updates, project news, and announcements here, so stay tuned! The best part of using AI here is how easy it is to add new content.

What I learned from the website#

Even though I'm not super experienced yet, I personally think that knowing how things work under the hood is really important.

Building this website doesn't really follow that philosophy, but it's a special case since I didn't have time to learn full web dev right now:)) However, the project taught me an important lesson: to prompt AI well for unique results, you still NEED a solid foundation in programming and UI understanding. Nothing works out on the first try, but overall, I'm happy with how much cleaner and cool the site looks compared to before.

Managing this project became way more painful as it got bigger. So definitely having your own knowledge is very valuable, haha

I'd love to hear your feedback! If you have suggestions or ideas on how to make it even better, feel free to contact me. (I figured I'll collect what feels wanky or weird to y'all and fix it)

I still gotta fix these pesky margins

Thanks a lot for reading! I really wanted to test how this is working

Citation:)