Rebuilding Mitch. Gentlemen, we can make him stronger.

Earlier this week I looked at my website, and feeling a little ashamed of it decided it needed a new coat of paint. It wasn't the highest priority in my life this week, or even in the top 3, but I opted to indulge myself for a few hours to at least make a start.

Of course this being 2023, I reached out to my new best friend ChatGPT. In the last 3 weeks, I have been AI-ing up a storm. I've used it for 3 main things;

  1. some queries that I might have previously used Google for
  2. rewriting sentences and paragraphs for articles
  3. but especially, assisting me with programming

Buoyed by the extra confidence my new best friend gave me, I thought I'd take the opportunity to learn a new way of developing a website. I threw out my old ways and here it is; the all-new improved mitcholson.co.nz; better, stronger, faster than before.

I haven't programmed much over the last 15 years so my skills are pretty rusty. With this challenge in mind you couldn't hope for a better and more cost-effective mentor; ChatGPT is bloody amazing. In the last 3 weeks I've used about 7 or 8 technologies that I haven't used, or haven't used for a long time; Postgresql, Nextjs, Javascript, Tailwind, Netlify, Handlebars, Nunjucks and more. I estimate it has improved my programming productivity by a factor of at least 3. It has been game-changing for me, and the sense of enhanced mastery is intoxicating. Which I think is mostly why the 3 hours of time I allocated to redevelop the website turned into 3 days.

Once I'd finished developing the underlying technology it was time to turn my attention to the copy and I transferred the articles from my old Wordpress website. I was about to publish the new website when I realised that the last time I posted an article was in 2018. This somewhat diminished the feeling of "new-and-improved" so I had to write this article to signal more 2023-ness. And I'm just realising now that I've written this whole thing using my own brain, without any help from ChatGPT. Thank goodness I can still string a few words together by myself.