Planting the first seed

Welcome to the beginning of Questadon, my little plot of cloud-soil where I’ll be documenting what I learn, make, and experiment with. A place where I can try things out, document the weird and wonderful bits of the process, and hopefully connect with others doing the same.

My goal is simple: use this site as a no-budget learning project where I house my other learning and creative projects! I'm hoping to build things that are thoughtful, fast, and sustainable. And end up with stuff that I actually personally use!

Why I’m doing this

So, I'm primarily a designer and marketer; I’ve been creating websites for years (2008, yikes) using platforms like Webflow. I had never been really interested in the nuts and bolts of programming, but hello 2025 and crazy-times-in-the-world, suddenly I find myself feeling a lot more digital-DIY-inclined.

I want the things I make to reflect how I work and what I value. That means:

• Keeping things lean and performant (small page sizes, optimized images, reasonable JS, eventually light/dark mode)
• Building on other people's work—no need to reinvent the wheel for the sake of it, use what's already out there and put it together in new ways that work for me
• Crediting the amazing people, tools, and small companies I learn from along the way

The core constraints:

• No money down
• Environmentally mindful
• Learning-focused above all
• Make stuff I want!

Y'all, I don't know what I'm doing here. If you're doing something similar, say hi! Seeing people working on stuff that makes the digital world safer, more environmentally-sustainable, more accessible to all, and better for humans in general—that stuff gives me hope.

My starting point

Where am I starting from? I'm relatively familiar with HTML and CSS, and I’ve just taken my first dip into Python and JavaScript. My learning will be assisted by AI, I'm gonna vibe-code my way through a lot of this (yep, really inviting the hate from that comment), but as I immerse myself in these projects I'll be looking to learn from other sources as well.

I'm starting with just building this website, though I have a couple other projects already in progress. What I've done so far:

• Picked Obsidian to track my learning and outline content
• Chose 11ty as my static site generator for this website
• Planned a Dev Garden (posts like this, built as a learn-in-public journal)
• Consolidated some Projects I've already been working on—builds, experiments, useful tools

This is only the beginning—but I’m already learning a lot. And that’s kind of the whole point.

Let’s see where this takes me.