Brayden Riesberg

This Site

09 May 2026

Why

I gotta have some central location to keep track of projects I work on, like things that don’t fit on a one-page resume. Also, I wanted to just make a site by hand without AI, for the love of the game.

Design Philosophy

Evidently, I didn’t go crazy with the UI. It’s just static html and css. No javascript. I went with Jekyll for the framework. The first portolio site I made in my undergrad used Jekyll, so I wanted to keep using it. That was using a pre-made template, though, whereas this is one I made from scratch. I tried out a next.js based site at one point and didn’t like it very much.

I prefer not to make this site another flashy dime a dozen neon dev portfolio pumped full of js animation slop nonsense (just look up “dev portfolio examples”, and you’d see what I mean). The purpose of this website is solely to provide information about me, not to show off any crazy technical frontend dev skills. Besides, literally anyone can get AI nowadays to add wacky wild whizbang animations to their sites. These animations just add visual noise and detract from the main message. They end up coming off as tacky and pretentious.

On the topic of AI, I’ll just briefly say that I think of it as a tool which is useful when used in certain contexts. But, I don’t use it here.

  1. I actually enjoy working on stuff. I like learning about technologies and getting into things. I want to use this site as a way to provide insight into my technical understanding and my efforts. And to learn while making it. Using AI for this would defeat the whole purpose for me.

  2. I’m doing this in my free time. This isn’t for work. I’m not trying to crunch and meet a deadline or anything.

  3. I have more respect for you, the reader, and your time, than to insult you by getting some bot to generate lists of made up projects and put them on this website pretending I have anything to do with them.

Also, with this minimal design, this site is more maintainable for me, and I don’t have to go digging through some react-based library’s documentation because I forgot how to center a div.

The Stack

As mentioned. I’m using Jekyll. Trying to write every page of a website from scratch would be a pretty painful experience, especially with all the boilerplate, reusable components, and recurring layouts. That’s where frameworks come in!

Jekyll uses Liquid, which is a template engine. It cuts down repetitive code by giving you control flow, variables, and filters. Here’s an example using liquid to iterate over a list (usually in a .yaml file stored somewhere):

<ul id="products">
  {% for product in products %}
    <li>
      <h2>{{ product.name }}</h2>
      Only {{ product.price | price }}

      {{ product.description | prettyprint | paragraph }}
    </li>

{% endfor %}

</ul>

I bought ‘braydenriesberg.com’ as a domain name around April 2026. Pretty proud of getting that before another Brayden Riesberg did. And I know they exist.

Since everything in this site is static, I can host with GitHub Pages and just have my domain name point to it.

Inspiration

I sort of wanted my site to take after these guys, who’ve each made a decently-sized impact in the world of computer science. And, if they can get away with their stripped down Web 1.0 looking sites, then it means their personal achievements speak for themselves.

Stroustrup's Website

Creator of C++'s Personal Website