I've wanted to rebuild my website for a really long time. It's gone through several iterations in the past – some more tacky than the others. I started off wanting to use the opportunity to learn lots of interesting new web frameworks, like Angular/React. Turns out, this is a poor choice for a personal website. These heavy handed frameworks are too complex for the simple, static website and introduce a unnecessary overhead to the build process.
This time, I've settled for a simple static website that is served using Express. For fun, I hooked in Gulp for task management and use Sass/Babel for CSS and ES6 compiling.
The majority of the website was completed in the span of a day or two – but I'll be tweaking it here and there. Since it's so lightweight, I expect that I'll be able to iterate through new website designs whenever I'm bored quite quickly! :)
Node/NPM, obviously. You'll also need gem install sass if you don't have it already.
After npm install-ing, you can run the gulp commands, e.g. gulp develop to start a LiveReload server, hosted at localhost:8080 by default.