Rebuilding My Site with Narrative CMS
Twenty years ago, I built a blogging platform called Narrative. It was an ASP.NET-based CMS with advanced features like automatic page rebuilding, a sophisticated tagging system, and comment spam prevention. I used it to power this site from 2003 until 2008, when I abandoned it in favor of WordPress, saying "I am much more interested in blogging than the building of blogging software." That code sat shelved for nearly two decades. Then, in 2024, I discovered Claude Code and realized something profound: with AI assistance, I could finally bring Narrative back to life—not as a compromise, but as exactly the system I'd always envisioned. This post tells that story.
My Coding Experience
Recently, I failed one, probably two, maybe even three, live coding exercises. The exercises were part of a series of interviews for a role at a startup that makes products and services I'm passionate about. I've written a different article about my thoughts on the value of live coding exercises but wanted to take this opportunity to narrate my lifetime of experience writing computer code. I don't expect this article to be of any interest to anyone, save perhaps a future interviewer, in which case I hope this lends some credence to the statement "I know how to code."