I replaced my About page with an AI trained on my brain
I just rebuilt mattdowney.com from scratch, and what started as a site refresh turned into something I didn't plan: a full consolidation of everything I make.
98 articles and 40 newsletter editions, all searchable. An AI chatbot trained on everything I've written (more below). The shop rebuilt from the ground up after ditching Shopify entirely. A playground for my Midjourney work. Sound design woven throughout. Each piece pulled the next one into scope.
MattGPT was the most intentional piece of the whole rebuild. I think traditional About pages are dying. A static bio doesn't tell you how someone thinks. An AI trained on everything I've written does. Ask it about a post from two years ago and it pulls the exact line. Ask it what I care about and it synthesizes across hundreds of pieces. It's an About page that's actually useful.
Dropping Shopify was the hardest technical lift, but worth it. No more yearly fees, no more template constraints. The whole site runs on Next.js and Tailwind 4 now (full breakdown on my new Stack page).
Curious if anyone else has gone down this path of pulling everything under one roof. It felt excessive the entire time I was building it. Now that it's live, I can't imagine scattering it back across platforms.
Give it a look: I'd love to know what you think. Oh, and there's an easter egg on the Home page. See if you can find it. :)
In today's newsletter, I've got 10 articles for you, including:
- Chocolate bars with edible sheet music inside. Yes, really.
- Your website looks broken at 850px. Here's why that happens.
- Planning to start isn't starting. Failing badly while trying is.
- And more...
Most Interesting
16 Pieces of Design Wisdom
Hardik Pandya shares practical insights on design craft, from capturing ideas and picking worthy problems to viewing feedback as dialogue and sustaining longevity in the field.
Design + Development
Pangram Pangram walks through how to enable and control font ligatures across Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Microsoft Office, and CSS, explaining the difference between standard and discretionary ligatures and when to use each.
Ahmad Shadeed explains the 'too early breakpoint' pattern in responsive design, where layouts switch to mobile too soon, creating awkward in-between states. He critiques real-world examples like Time.com and shares better approaches.
A set of skills to polish user interfaces built by agents.
Tech + Innovation
A minimalist blogging platform for writing and publishing without distractions. Includes built-in newsletters, privacy-friendly analytics, community comments, high-performance themes, easy migrations from WordPress or Ghost, custom domains, and core features free forever.
Fortnum & Mason turns chocolate into music with multi-sensory 'Bars of Music' by Otherway
Creative Boom covers Fortnum & Mason's reimagined chocolate bars, where design studio Otherway pairs each flavor with an original piano score mirroring its rhythm and texture. Packaging by Victoria Semykina reveals musical notation inside, blending taste, sound, and cultured wordplay.
OpenClaw is what Apple Intelligence should have been
Jake Quist argues OpenClaw delivers the local AI agent experience Apple Intelligence lacks, noting Mac Minis selling out for OpenClaw automation while Apple missed owning the agent layer.
Work + Mindset
How Richard Feynman taught me to grow fast
Jeremy Hsu shares lessons from Richard Feynman on deep learning through simplification, teaching concepts simply, identifying knowledge gaps, and refining explanations across design and beyond.
Erik Johannes Husom critiques outsourcing thinking to AI like chatbots, arguing it erodes project ownership, tacit knowledge, and decision-making skills, even for boring tasks. He counters the lump of labor fallacy by noting new cognitive work may not be fulfilling or beneficial.
Doing the thing is doing the thing
Prakhar Gupta lists common procrastination traps like planning, talking, or waiting to feel ready, which are not doing the thing. Failing, doing it badly, or timidly while starting... is doing the thing.
