This site — turning parked prototypes into an asset
How do I turn my habit of building things to a working proof of concept and then parking them into an asset — instead of a pile of unfinished work that quietly says 'doesn't finish'?
The fix was reframing, not discipline. A build log where the POC is the deliverable removes the shame of 'unfinished' and turns range into the story. Then it taught me the same lesson a second time, at its own expense: it sat finished on my hard drive for six weeks. The blocker was never the content — it was the last mile nobody writes a log entry about.
It isn't stopped. It went live on 12 August 2026. The remaining work is additive — entries, a /work section, the small things like a favicon — and none of it is a reason to stay unpublished.
What it is
The site you're on. A hub-and-spoke personal site — a router to where my work actually lives — with this build log as its heart: a working notebook of prototypes, each documented at the point it reached "it works."
The idea behind it
I start a lot and tend to stop at the proof-of-concept stage. Read one way, that's a stack of unfinished projects. Read another, it's a lab notebook full of explored ideas. The difference is entirely framing — and a single rule: every entry says what question it explored, what it taught me, and why it stopped there. That's what separates a lab from a graveyard.
How it's built
Plain Markdown files compiled into a static site with Eleventy. Each post is one .md file;
the feed, the home preview, and the per-topic tag pages all generate themselves. The visual
language is the NASApunk design system. The whole thing was built
by directing my multi-agent workspace — which is itself an entry
in this log.
The six weeks it spent finished and invisible
Worth recording, because it's the same failure this site exists to document.
The site was built at the end of June. Eleven entries, five sections, everything working. Then it sat on my hard drive until 12 August — not blocked on content, not blocked on design. Blocked on deploying it. The exact pattern the build log was invented to confront, executed on the build log itself.
What it actually took, once I stopped avoiding it: compile, zip the output, drop it on Cloudflare Pages, point the domain. Under an hour of real work spread across six weeks of not doing it.
Two things I learned in that hour, both the kind that only show up in the last mile:
- Windows writes broken ZIP files. Both the built-in "compress" and PowerShell's
Compress-Archivestore paths with backslashes, which isn't what the ZIP format expects. Uploaded as-is, the folder structure collapses and the site breaks. The archive has to be built entry by entry with the separators normalised. - A browser will keep showing you a dead site after it's alive. The domain threw an SSL error while it was still being set up, Chrome memorised it, and kept serving me its own error page long after the site was serving fine to everyone else. I spent a while diagnosing DNS, certificates and gateways before checking the site from outside the browser — where it had been working the whole time. Verify from outside first.
Where it stands
Live at starquixote.com, and now being filled with the back-catalogue of POCs — the entries around this one. The structure holds; adding to it never requires a redesign, which was the whole point.