Nexus, This Website

The problem

A personal site has to do three jobs at once: show the work, rank in search, and turn a curious visitor into a conversation. It also had to cost nothing to run, speak the languages of the people I work with, and still feel crafted.

The approach

• Static first. Every page is prerendered for every language and served from a CDN. Only the AI assistant, the contact form and the dashboard run on demand.
• Eighteen languages, one source of truth. Interface strings live in one JSON file per language. Profile and services are typed TypeScript content with per-language fields, and long-form posts fall back to English with an honest banner instead of a machine translation.
• An assistant that cannot go down. Answers come from the site's own content. When a free AI provider is rate-limited the next one takes over, and when none are available a local knowledge base answers from templates in the visitor's language.
• Progressive enhancement. Animations, search and the terminal enhance server-rendered HTML through a single tiny client island; without JavaScript the content is all still there.

The result

The site is fast on a mid-range phone, works in right-to-left Arabic, and costs only the domain name. The assistant answers in every supported language, even with zero API keys configured.

What I’d do differently

Start the content model first. Most of the hard decisions (what is translated, what falls back, what the AI may say) are content decisions, not code decisions.