Building the Lab

This is the site writing about itself, which is either the most honest thing a portfolio can do or the most self-indulgent. I am going to say honest.

rhygpu.dev started as a single homepage mockup — one imported design file, a nice hero, and nothing behind it. Everything after that was the same problem I keep circling back to in every project: take something that looks finished and give it real structure.

The first version was one page. A dark hero, a flagship card, a devlog list — all hardcoded, all pretend. The devlog entries were fake strings in a template. The screenshots were grey placeholder boxes.

It looked done. It was not done.

A homepage that lies about having content is worse than an empty one, because it invites you to click things that go nowhere.

The real work was making the rest of the site match, and doing it once instead of per page.

So the design moved into shared bones: a single set of tokens, one sticky nav, one footer, applied from the layout down. Every page — projects, devlogs, about, resume, contact — now inherits the same look instead of each carrying its own copy that slowly drifts out of sync.

The homepage stopped being a special case. It became the first page of a system.

Projects and devlogs are not hand-written HTML. They are typed Markdown collections, validated at build time.

That sounds like bureaucracy until the first time a missing field turns into a build error instead of a blank space in production. The structure is the point. A project is data. A devlog is data. The pages are just a view over that data.

The part I actually like: every project gets its own devlog homepage, automatically.

A new entry only needs a project name in its frontmatter, and it flows into the right journal. Projects with no entries yet still get a page, with an honest “no devlogs yet” state instead of a dead link. Which is exactly why this entry can exist at all —

rhygpu.dev is a project. So rhygpu.dev gets a devlog.

The site is built the same way it documents everything else in the lab: in the open, with the machinery visible. This is entry 000. There will be more when there is more worth writing down.