“My secret sauce is having a foot in both camps, business and engineering.”

A few weeks ago I built www.1duck.tech using Claude Code and Fable 5, and I use Claude to keep the site updated with roughly three new articles a week, this one included.

We've come a long way since I started building websites on HTML 4.0 and Perl scripting. Remember when animated gifs were a thing? I did most of my edits in Notepad on Windows and Vi on Linux.

The site has to prove the pitch

If I'm telling a business I can build clean, fast, considered software, the site making that pitch needs to hold up to the same standard. A generic templated homepage doesn't prove anything.

So this site borrowed from an editorial, Thoughtworks-inspired look, a cinematic dark hero with a serif display headline, a staggered reveal where each line lands on its own before an orange bar draws underneath, then numbered editorial columns for services instead of another row of rounded cards, and a pull-quote strip that reads “My secret sauce is having a foot in both camps, business and engineering.”

Under the hood

It's Next.js and strict TypeScript, Tailwind for styling with no custom CSS beyond the design tokens, and a static export, no server runtime, just files sitting on a webserver.

The part I actually care about most: every redesign gets a written design doc before I touch a line of code, the same spec-and-plan process I use on client work. If I skipped that step here, I'd have no business asking a client to follow it.