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About This Site

My journey with Gemini and Claude.

Why I Built It

The revuzeit.com domain was established when my wife Mary Alice and I sold our bookstore, Mystery Lovers Bookshop in 2012. We thought that we would use it to post book reviews, notes about travel, restaurants and so forth.

It turned out it wasn't so easy to develop a website on your own. I just never seemed to have the time to figure it out: the design, the coding, css, javascript, finding a host, paying for it and so on.

Fast forward 13 years. Wow, whole new world.

I'd been experimenting with AI from the initial release of ChatGPT and had tried out Claude, Perplexity and, more recently, Gemini. It made sense to put generative and agentic AI to work building my site — at last.

How I Built It — The AI Journey

This site was built entirely through conversation with AI tools. I have not written any of the code directly. Instead, I described what I wanted, reviewed what was produced, and guided the direction. What you see here is the result of that collaboration.

Phase 1: Gemini (December 2025 – January 2026)

I began the project using Google's Gemini as my development partner. Conversation with Gemini led to use of Vercel as a server-less host, free for a Hobby account. Based on Gemini suggestions I adopted the tech stack using Next JS, React and Tailwind CSS.

Starting from scratch in December 2025, the first steps were:

  • •December 2025: Initial project setup, placeholder page, and official launch of revuzeit.com
  • •I used Figma to generate a design based on a prompt. With Gemini's help I copied and pasted the Figma-generated code into the proper modules in the VS Code IDE.
  • •January 2026: First working version of the split-screen layout — the Professional side on the left, the Personal side on the right — which remains the core design of the home page today

Phase 2: Claude Code (February 2026) — The Professional Side

One of the limitations of Gemini was its inability to directly update the source code in VS Code, leading to quite a bit of copy and paste.

In February 2026 I switched to Anthropic's Claude Code, a terminal-based AI coding assistant because it directly integrated with VS Code. Development accelerated quickly:

  • •Resume page with a passcode-protected PDF download
  • •Experience page with an accordion layout showing roles and accomplishments across Apple, Mystery Lovers Bookshop, and a software career
  • •Goals page covering my professional and personal aspirations
  • •Skills page with hover and tap-to-reveal descriptions for each tool and technology
  • •Navigation improvements throughout the site
  • •This About page

I would estimate that these changes required less than 10 hours of my time.

Phase 3: Claude Code (March 2026) — The Personal Side

In early March I turned to development of the Personal side of the site — the photo gallery system.

In discussion with Claude we evolved an approach using Major Categories (such as Family, Biography, Travel) and Minor Categories (Albums). Each album would have descriptive text and a series of photos, each with a caption.

Links from the Major Category cards on the home page lead to a display of Albums, which in turn show descriptive text plus a photo gallery with a full-screen lightbox viewer. This required:

  • •A Postgres database (provided by Neon via Vercel) to store categories, captions, and metadata
  • •A Blob store (Vercel) to hold the actual photo files
  • •An admin interface to create and manage categories and upload photos
  • •Automatic EXIF extraction — pulling date taken and GPS coordinates directly from HEIC and JPEG files
  • •Reverse geocoding — converting GPS coordinates to a readable location name using OpenStreetMap
  • •Image processing — converting HEIC photos to WebP format and resizing for the web using Sharp

All of this was accomplished over a period of a few days with probably 6 to 8 hours of my time, with Claude generating all of the code.

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