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Alex Taitague Building Products, Learning in Public
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./ shipping-v0-of-my-personal-site.md

Shipping V0 of My Personal Site

log

How do you ship a personal site in 2026? I don’t think you can do it well without being explicit about what “shipping” actually means — especially what a version 0 is and isn’t.

I’m more comfortable defining the problem than executing the solution — but in 2026, that’s no longer a valid reason not to build.

What do I need in a V0?

  1. A Core Purpose — a personal website that the owner doesn't want to use is not going to be useful to anyone else
  2. A Clear Entry Point — a homepage that answers who is this? what is this?
  3. At Least One Real Post — this is it! Making quick logs of my work and my process as I build and refine this site is the start of it all. It isn't real if I don't do this step. Getting Astro's content collection system up and running was my key priority so that I can write while everything else is in progress.
  4. A Live Deployed Site — is this too obvious? I'm not stressing about a pretty domain name yet. Netlify will do. (at the time of writing, the URL is alext-product-demo.netlify.app)

What I'm Not Doing For V0

What you de-prioritize is critically important...ask any product manager. For now, we're leaving out refined visual identity, post tags, RSS, analytics, "dark mode" (lol). There is plenty of time to polish. At the moment, I need a functional place to establish a practice of writing, logging, ideating, and shipping. I would paralyze myself trying to make something “beautiful” before I had anything real to say.

How'd I Get Here

I sat down, chose Astro as the foundation, set up VS Code, and focused on getting something real running as quickly as possible. I followed Astro's initial tutorial and as soon as I felt comfortable in the code editor I went and found "Astro Baseline", and didn't look back.

GitHub Co-Pilot has made everything from there relatively easy and I've been able to focus fully on those V0 requirements.

What Now

This isn’t a manifesto and it isn’t finished. It’s a starting point I can actually use. If I’m still writing here a month from now, then V0 did its job.