How I Made This Site with Codex
I had the domain. I had the ChatGPT pro subscription. I had the time.
I’m looking for a job and had the time. If I can’t “use AI” at work because I don’t have a job, what do I have at my disposal to keep my brain sharp and show employers that I still got it?
The Context
Initially, my goal was to have something minimal and aesthetic. Then I realized, in a world where everyone is interacting with slick GPTs, we need a little color in our lives. I know gen z/gen alpha is obsessed with y2k, but I actually lived it so I wanted to make sure my site had personality and reflected a “well I didn’t wish this was made with AI but I did it anyway to show employers that I know what I’m doing” attitude.
I already had the domain genlau.com, (also side note, a woman named Jennifer owns genevievelau.com and that’s rude) and it was just sitting there making me pay $20 a year for nothing. Then I had a the idea to put it to use but I also didn’t want to pay $120 a year for a website subscription either.
What Codex Helped With
Codex helped me put together all the steps I needed to create a website and connect it to my existing domain. My work experience really helped here though. As a martech manager at Oportun, having a technical foundation and understanding high-level fundamentals of networking came in clutch. The acronyms “DNS” and CNAME didn’t scare me away from this project because knowing the primary functions of GitHub and Cloudflare made sense to me and Terminal doesn’t seem like a developer’s black box. After a bit of authentication troubleshooting and nameserver updates, the current version of genlau.com was born.
What I Still Have to Decide
What’s going to live on here? I have a lot of feelings being in the job market in this current stage, and let’s be honest. AI is making this MESSY. But I know I can channel my feelings and thoughts into this project while using it as my portfolio.