Hello, my name is Shaun and welcome to my digital garden! I work as a Data Engineer in Sydney, Australia and this website is a hobby project that I’ve wanted to create for quite some time.
This website is built using markdown files managed through Obsidian. Quartz turns the markdown files into a HTML webpage and deployment is done using Cloudflare Pages.
Thought process on creating this website:
- It’s always been a personal goal to build a personal website from scratch, but unfortunately I have no knowledge of HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
- Vibe coded my way to a prototype website using Claude and Qwen2.5, however I quickly realized this isn’t maintainable as I still do not have the web dev skills to customize it.
- At the same time, I started using Notion as a note-taking / project management tool.
- Notion works great, however the free version has its limits and the data is stored on their servers at the end of day.
- Came across Obsidian, but didn’t like that I have to pay for Obsidian Sync / Publish. Fortunately, Obsidian has an extensive community plugin support.
- Self-hosted an instance of Obsidian Livesync on my home Raspberry Pi. At the same time, setup Tailscalefor all my devices. This means I am now able to sync my notes (and plugins) across all devices in my Tailnet (and replacing Notion in the process).
- Came across a comment by the CEO of Obsidian on different open source options for publishing Obsidian - started looking into Quartz.
- Thanks to the clear and extensive Quartz documentation, here I am now.
I mainly wanted to build a simple website that:
- Points to various side projects that I have been working on
- Create documentations on said side projects
- Able to share and access notes anywhere
- (Maybe in the future) Create a blog
Bonus features in using Obsidian to build the website:
- Combines my personal notes with the website
- A Bucket List to track TODOs and accomplishments