This is the very first post I'm writing for erinmusicbox.com! How exciting. For a long time, I envisioned having a website for my brand, but only now, more than five years after my first commission as erinmusicbox, has it come to fruition. Here I'll recount a brief history of my efforts to build a website for erinmusicbox and why, at long last, I'm now putting energy into it.
Some of you may know that I'm a software engineer by trade: I just finished up my bachelor's in Computer Science last June (woo!). It was for a class in college called Arts Entrepreneurship that I first got the erinmusicbox.com domain, back in 2021. The class required that each student undertake some sort of project, and I decided mine would be a programming project that eventually became the Music Box MIDI Visualizer. The MIDI Visualizer is built on lots of math and HTML Canvas. You can read more about its conception here. For years, the MIDI Visualizer was the extent of what erinmusicbox.com was.
I always knew I wanted erinmusicbox.com to be more than a visualizer tool that only I and my customers used, but I could never find the time or energy to work on it. Then, in January, I was sick with a bad cold for nearly two weeks. I dug out this website again, thinking I'd just put some finishing touches on the MIDI Visualizer. But after asking Chat GPT about how to adapt my JavaScript callback functions in Angular, I realized it could help me build something bigger.
Chat GPT has become a regular part of my workflow as a software engineer---it's great with syntax and generating potential solutions to solve specific software issues. It is decent, too, I discovered, at generating boilerplate website templates that I can fill in. It can generate CSS in my preferred style (I use Tailwind) and create basic layouts. Combined with my development knowledge, Chat GPT vastly speeds up the process of developing this website, and further, it takes care of the parts I least want to do. It allows me to zoom out and play the architect, the big-picture-thinker, most of the time.
I will comment as a disclaimer that it Chat GPT in its current version is NOT to be relied upon! Large language models are not magic and they are certainly not human. They can miss obvious things and sometimes "hallucinate" falsehoods altogether. However, in the absence of another developer to collaborate with, Chat GPT was a greatly useful tool to find solutions to my specific issues.
The result is a fully-fledged Angular website with a melody catalog, a blog, and a pretty (not quite yet) homepage along with my MIDI Visualizer. It's certainly still in development (at the moment, it's not very responsive...) so expect to see me around here every so often. I'll also note that building this website certainly did utilize the knowledge I've gained from my previous full-stack web development experience and that while Chat was a great help, this project still required a good deal of coding knowledge.
I hope one outcome of the recent AI boom is everyone else starts making websites, too. Maybe it will get easier for non-developers to dictate and then realize their own personal website visions. It seems very idyllic to regress into pre-late-2010s internet where such webpages were common. I hope to see it.
Please enjoy my little corner of the internet. See you around!
Erin
Comments
Post a Comment