I help businesses optimize their processes and solve their problems — systems, ecommerce, and whatever else they can think of. 2026-07-31T00:00:00Z https://kelvinclarkte.gitlab.io/ Kelvin Clark Te inquiry@kelvinclarkte.com 2026-07-31T00:00:00Z https://kelvinclarkte.gitlab.io/blog/rebuilding-this-site/

Why I moved my portfolio off Angular and onto a static site generator, and what changed.

<p>This site used to be an Angular single-page app. It is now a pile of static HTML generated by <a href="https://www.11ty.dev/">Eleventy</a>, and it loads considerably faster for it.</p> <h2>Why the change</h2> <p>The old version shipped an entire SPA framework, a router and a runtime to render what is, in practice, four pages of mostly text. My work history lived inside a TypeScript component as an array of objects, which meant adding a project required touching application code and redeploying a build pipeline.</p> <p>For a portfolio, that trade is backwards. There is no interactivity to speak of, no authenticated state, no data fetching. Every page can be known at build time.</p> <h2>What it looks like now</h2> <p>The content lives in plain data files and Markdown:</p> <pre><code class="language-text">src/ _data/works.js → work history posts/*.md → blog posts _includes/ → layouts and macros </code></pre> <p>Adding a project is now an edit to one array. Adding a blog post is dropping a Markdown file into <code>src/posts/</code>. The build emits static HTML with no client-side framework at all — the only JavaScript on the page is a theme toggle and a scroll-reveal observer, both of which degrade gracefully to nothing.</p> <h2>The parts worth keeping</h2> <p>Not everything needed replacing. The work history itself — five companies, thirteen projects, a decade of it — carried over almost verbatim. That content was always the point; the framework around it was incidental.</p> <blockquote> <p>Rewrite the delivery mechanism, keep the substance.</p> </blockquote> <p>If you're sitting on an SPA that renders static content, it's worth asking what the framework is actually buying you.</p>