Why Most Developers Overthink Their First Website (And What to Ship Instead)

I've watched dozens of developers spend months building a personal website from scratch, choosing between Next.js and Astro, debating CSS frameworks, hand-rolling a CMS, implementing dark mode with system preference detection, adding view transitions, setting up a CI/CD pipeline -- and then never actually shipping it. Or they ship it once, write one blog post, and never touch it again because the maintenance overhead of their custom setup kills their motivation. The best website is the one that's live. Let me walk through what actually matters and what's pure yak-shaving. What a website needs to do Strip away the technical decisions and a website has one job: communicate information to a visitor. That's it. The visitor arrives, finds what they're looking for (or doesn't), and leaves. The technology behind the page is invisible and irrelevant to them. For a developer portfolio, the minimum viable site needs: Your name and what you do (above the fold, immediately visible) 3-5 project sho