It was supposed to be a quick and simple job: spin up an Eleventy website, add RevealJS, and viola!; a brand new site to list/showcase my slidedecks from various talks I did over the years.

What should’ve been a short couple of hours wound up taking the entire day with interesting detours on nodejs version management (perils of working with abandoned codebases), several side trips into why CSS frameworks are the best thing/the worst (take your pick), and also multiple instances of throwing away hour’s worth of work to start afresh, though I wound up deleting several promising ideas too (baby and bathwater). There were also episodes of several arguments with different LLMs on why the code it was spitting out was outright wrong. (Arguing with LLMs always seems to devolve into the AI trying to give the best answer that will please me.)

All said and done, I finally got a version that I’m somewhat happy about.

Though tomorrow, I have plans to wrangle with CSS a bit and read a bit about colour theory and how many slides are optimal for a sub-hour long talk on AI. (I once wrote a 100+ slide on Red Cross for one of my postgraduate communication classes. 😅) Or I might just decide to watch some anime tomorrow (I still need to catch up on Solo Leveling Season 2.)

I think I need more days like these now and then…