This site started from a Udemy course by Brad Schiff. The basis was building a website for a university where I learned PHP basics, taking an HTML site and turning it into a WordPress theme from scratch.

I went back and forth for a while on what language to use. There’s a lot out there telling you WordPress and PHP aren’t worth learning anymore. I decided to finish the course anyway. I really liked the repetitiveness of the instruction. It helped drive the concepts home in a way that stuck. I’ll be honest though: I didn’t actually finish it. Not because I gave up, but because the course was a bit outdated, and I used ChatGPT to help me work through the chapters and update what had changed. I also skipped the login, signup, and “liking” features on purpose — I didn’t want to deal with user accounts to that extent. But the first half of the course gave me what I needed: PHP basics, functions.php, custom post types, and how to make different content types talk to each other in a way that makes a site worth using.

At that point I had the foundation. What I didn’t have was a reason to build a fictional university.

For years I’ve been fascinated by the way a single ingredient threads through cultures across the world. A coconut shows up in the Caribbean and in Southeast Asia. A dumpling appears in almost every culture under a different name. I started looking at what desserts had coconut in them, then eventually flipped it: starting from the desserts themselves and mapping what they had in common. It was a way into relational databases that actually interested me.

When ChatGPT first became public I started asking it what the most popular desserts were in different countries. The AI was newer then and it hallucinated constantly. At one point it offered up a Brussels Sprouts Cake, complete with a description telling me not to be fooled by the name, then listed what sounded like an actual cake recipe. When I cross-referenced it online I found joke cakes decorated to look like Brussels sprouts. When I went back to the chat and called it out, it admitted it was wrong.

That frustration sent me back to people. I started asking anyone I ran into in Brooklyn what their favorite dessert was growing up, or what their family made. It reminded me of a storyline in Halt and Catch Fire where Joe is asking people for their website names while building what was essentially an early internet index. That’s what it felt like. Collecting something real, one conversation at a time.

The project kept expanding. I figured a site like this had to exist already — and it did. TasteAtlas. I fell in love with it immediately, and of course it was built by developers working with MongoDB. I combined what I was learning from the course with my obsession with TasteAtlas and built something using subject matter I actually cared about.

One thing that felt genuinely new to me: we don’t have to use Lorem Ipsum anymore. AI-assisted copy, reviewed and fact-checked, means a portfolio site can have real content. That mattered to me. I wanted to build something useful, not fictional.

Coming up

In the next posts I’ll get into the actual build — custom post types, PHP templates, the plugin I wrote, and what accessibility taught me about my own color choices. After that, deployment: what broke, how I fixed it, and why I’m still thinking about where my images are coming from.