The Hello World post explains why I built this site. This one is about how it actually happened.
What I was starting with
I’ve been in IT for over 10 years — infrastructure, networks, servers. Web development? Genuine zero. I couldn’t have told you what Astro was two days before I used it.
What I did have: a freshly bought domain on Cloudflare, a Claude Pro subscription, and a few loose requirements. I knew I wanted to use Cloudflare — I work with it professionally for DNS and had always liked the platform. I also wanted to use GitHub. I’d never actually used it to build anything, but like a lot of admins I’d spent time browsing other people’s repos. It felt like the right place to start.
For everything else — the stack, the framework, how to structure the project — I let Claude lead.
How the evening went
I opened Claude Cowork and described what I wanted: a personal website with a blog, bilingual, dark and light mode, deployed on Cloudflare with my own domain. Then I just started. Claude picked the stack and wrote files directly into my GitHub repo. When something broke, we debugged together. When I didn’t understand something, I asked.
It felt less like using a tool and more like working with someone who happened to know web development.
What actually surprised me
My IT background mattered more than I expected — just not in the way I thought. I wasn’t writing code, but I understood DNS, CDNs, error messages. Those skills transferred directly, even across a different domain.
The other thing: I never felt stuck. The collaboration kept the momentum going the entire evening.
What this means
If you work in IT, you already think in systems. You’re not starting from zero when it comes to building with AI — you’re further ahead than you think.
In the next post, I’ll get into the details — the stack, how the back-and-forth with Claude actually worked, and how the deployment came together. The full behind-the-scenes.