My background is mechanical engineering, and my day job is running simulations, not writing code. But software was always the area I wanted to spend more time in, and at some point "someday" needed to turn into an actual project. This site became that project.
The tempting route was to reach for a big framework. Instead, I picked the simplest stack that could possibly work: PHP for templating and the language switcher, plain CSS for styling, and vanilla JavaScript for the small interactive bits.
The best decision was keeping all the text in a single translations file. Adding a new page means adding a handful of strings in two languages — and the whole site stays consistent. The dark mode toggle was the trickiest part: the theme has to be applied before the page paints, otherwise you get an ugly white flash.
I also built it with an AI pair-programmer alongside me, which turned out to be its own kind of learning — I still made every decision, but I could ask "why" at every step instead of just copying a tutorial. It fits with where my curiosity has been going lately: I want to actually understand how these AI tools work, not just use them.
Would a framework have been faster? Maybe. But I understand every line of this site, and building it taught me more about web development than any tutorial could have. This is where the software side of things actually began.