Benjamin Carlier

Welcome to bencar.me!

Why a personal website?#

As a backend developer, I spend most of my time deep in code, designing systems, and most importantly solving problems.

I've always felt that writing about what I do helps me think more clearly, and sometimes, those thoughts are worth sharing, I mean hopefully.

So this is first and foremost for me, but I hope it can be useful for others too.

What I'm planning to write about:

Software development - architecture, patterns, and what I've figured out building things
Artificial Intelligence - what actually works in production, navigating the hype, and my latest experiments
Biking - my way of unplugging and exploring, some of my favorite routes and experiences, moments I share with my friends on the bike
Life - reflections, ideas, and everything in between

The tech stack of this site#

This site is built with:

Next.js (React) for the framework
Tailwind CSS for styling
Markdown files with YAML frontmatter for managing blog content
A simple file-based content system - no CMS, no database, just .md files

I wanted something lightweight that I could fully control. Writing a post is as simple as creating a new markdown file, and that feels right.

Inspirations and credits#

This site is largely inspired by Peter Steinberg's own blog. Although I've taken a different approach to the tech stack, the overall design and layouts are similar.

I was really seduced by many things:

how the design feels, the colors, the typography, the simplicity
how it's intuitive to navigate
how easy it is to write a post, just create a new markdown file and voilà!

Looking at his source code allowed me to learn about Astro, which looks like an excellent fit for building static sites with Markdown. However, I wanted to see if I could recreate it with React, Next.js, and Tailwind, as that is a tech stack I'm a bit more familiar with.

Although I had to add a bit more configuration to the project to make it work with React, it still does the job.

What's next?#

I plan to write regularly. Some posts will be technical deep-dives, others will be more casual reflections. If you're here, thanks for reading - and stay tuned.