Weekly Nerd was a blog created during the Web Design & Development minor, where students were required to document and reflect on a series of industry lectures throughout the semester. Rather than building a traditional blog, I challenged myself to create something that felt personal and enjoyable to use. Inspired by Twitter, my favorite social media platform at the time, I designed and developed a custom “Twitter 2.0” experience that combined lecture notes and reflections into a playful social feed. Alongside documenting what I learned from each speaker, the project became an opportunity to experiment with templating engines, content management, and advanced CSS techniques. Looking back, it remains one of my favorite projects because it combines technical exploration, personal expression, and a snapshot of my growth during the minor.
I explored different social platforms and content-heavy websites to understand how information could be presented in a way that felt engaging. Since the assignment required frequent updates throughout the semester, I wanted a format that encouraged reading, browsing, and reflecting. Twitter’s feed-based approach felt like the perfect idea inspiring the overall interaction patterns, content hierarchy, and visual language of the project.
The idea was to make a regular lecture blog into a fictional social media platform. Each lecture would become a post, while reflections, opinions, and takeaways would feel like part of a living timeline. Instead of leaning across a conventional portfolio-style website, I focused on building an experience that reflected my personality and interests while still checking off the requirements of the course.
The website was built using the EJS templating engine, allowing content to be generated dynamically rather than manually creating individual pages. To make content management easier, I created a mini CMS for myself that reads Markdown files and converts them into posts. This allowed me to focus on writing and reflection while maintaining a consistent structure throughout the project. A large focus of the development process was CSS. Inspired by the styling techniques taught during the minor, I challenged myself to build almost the entire interface using CSS, relying on JavaScript only where necessary. This became an opportunity to go all out with layouts, animations, micro interactions and a bit of responsive design.
Weekly Nerd started as a school assignment but evolved into a playground for experimentation. Through the project I gained hands on experience with templating engines, Markdown content management, and CSS architecture. More importantly, I learned how much more enjoyable a project becomes when technical requirements are combined with personal interests. Even years later, it remains one of my favorite projects because it captures both what I learned during the minor and the joy I had while building it.
