Building LAThomson.net
I put a bunch of time into building this website, so I figured maybe it’s worth sharing some of that process as the website’s first blog post!
It started off as a super simple one-pager built on the [minimal theme]. I first came across the theme via the [Causal Incentives Group] website in mid-2023 while working on a behavioural definition of deception in LLMs based on structural causal games. I’m honestly surprised the theme stuck in my mind so much that I would come back to using it over two years later.
I didn’t strictly need a website. I’d made one with Wix years ago for my (now dead and buried) music career and found it was hours more work than it was worth; it collected a bunch of nice photos, had Spotify and Apple Music embeds, but really served no other purpose than for me to feel validated as a proper musician who might genuinely keep releasing more music.
Maybe talking about my old music could make for a future blog post…
Anyhow, this website is pretty different from my Wix one. This is built in a GitHub repo, originally by hand and more recently updated with the help of Claude; when I built my first website, I didn’t even know how to code. This one ties to a career I expect to have going forward; I don’t think I could say the same for my music career. This website is pretty personalised; my old one had a scrolling image gallery.
Speaking of personalisation, there are a couple easter eggs for you to find on the site. Nothing too big or grandiose. I won’t give clues, but you’ll know if you find them :)