LewisCleveland.uk

It was supposed to be a CV.

That was genuinely the plan. Somewhere to point people, tidier than a PDF, with a bit more personality than a job site profile.

It lasted about a week.

The problem with an online CV is that it describes a job. It does not describe what somebody is actually like, and it definitely does not explain why a field service engineer owns this many screwdrivers, coaches netball, plays ice hockey, is working through a networking certification and keeps building websites for people at weekends.

On a CV, that list looks like a lack of focus.

It isn't. It is one habit pointed at nine different things.

I didn't know how it worked, so I started pulling at the thread.

Once I stopped trying to make it look like a career and started letting it look like a workshop, it got considerably easier to build — and a lot more fun.

The look is mid-century retro-futurism, and it is not decoration bolted on at the end. It came first and everything else was built to fit inside it.

Cream, mustard, burnt orange, teal, faded blue and deep navy. Condensed display type over a plain, readable body face, with a monospace for the technical furniture. Painted gouache-style illustrations rather than stock photography. Status labels, equipment plates, drawing references, revision stamps, numbered sections — the visual vocabulary of a workshop manual rather than a marketing site.

Projects are numbered like job cards. Ideas are filed like slips in a drawer. Tools sit on shelves with a status against them. The Now page reads like a status board.

There are things it deliberately is not. It is not a 1950s diner. No chequerboard floors, no jukeboxes, no chrome for the sake of chrome, no Americana. That is fancy dress, and fancy dress is a different thing entirely from what I am after.

This is the part people ask about, so it is worth answering properly.

Part of it is personal. My dad was born in the 1950s, so when I look at the machines, illustrations and ideas that came out of that decade, I am looking at the world his generation arrived into. That thread runs further back too — my grandpa spent his career in engineering, including work connected with aero engines, which is a story of its own.

But the bigger reason has nothing to do with the past.

What I love about the 1950s is their idea of the future.

Look at how the future was drawn during that period. Jet aircraft. Monorails. Atomic power. Cities in the sky. Cars with fins that looked like somebody had sketched a runway and then attached wheels. Some of those predictions were remarkably close. Most were completely bonkers.

The accuracy is beside the point. What gets me is the confidence behind them — a working assumption that problems existed in order to be solved, and that if something didn't exist yet, somebody would go and build it.

And they were doing it on drawing boards. Pencils, paper, slide rules, models, machining, testing, and a great deal of "well, that didn't work". Then another drawing. Another prototype. Another attempt.

That process hasn't actually changed. The tools have. The curiosity hasn't.

Retro-futurism lets me borrow that optimism without pretending the past was perfect. It lets me take the visual language of yesterday's tomorrow and point it at the things I'm actually building today.

Once the metaphor arrived, the structure more or less designed itself.

Projects are the things on the bench. Field Notes are what gets written up afterwards. The Workshop holds the tools, with an honest verdict against each one. The Idea Drawer holds the slips of paper, including the ones that will never become anything. Now is the status board. Influences is the wall of people and machines that changed how I think about all of it.

The important part is that none of those are separate databases in a trench coat. A screwdriver review leads to the workshop. The workshop leads to a project. The project leads to a field note. The field note leads to my grandpa, or to a television programme, or to a man taking a motorcycle apart on the internet.

That wandering is the entire point. If somebody arrives here looking for one thing and leaves forty minutes later having read about something completely unrelated, the site has done its job.

It has been rebuilt, rearranged and generally interfered with more times than I can remember.

It started as a fairly ordinary portfolio layout. Then the retro-futurist identity took over. Then the workshop metaphor arrived and the navigation got rewritten around it. Then the writing started, and it turned out there was a lot more of that in me than expected. Then the tool reviews appeared. Then the projects for other people started needing somewhere to live, so a Websites section went in.

Underneath, it is deliberately boring technology. A folder of Markdown files and a few JSON files for the structured content, a Python script that turns them into plain HTML, and no build tooling to speak of. No framework. No database. No cookies, no tracking, no newsletter.

That is not minimalism as a personality trait. It is because I wanted to be able to open this in three years and still understand it, and because a site made of static files loads quickly on a phone in a car park, which is where a fair amount of the internet is actually consumed.

Writing is harder than building, and considerably more useful. Most of what is good on here came from being forced to explain something properly and discovering halfway through that I didn't understand it as well as I thought.

Constraints help. Having a fixed palette and a fixed component vocabulary means every new page takes an hour rather than a week, and the site stays coherent even when I am tinkering at eleven at night.

An unfinished thing on a page is more interesting than a polished thing. The projects people respond to are the ones where I have written down what broke.

And nothing kills a personal site faster than deciding it has to be finished before you are allowed to publish it.

A proper tool inventory, which is the single biggest gap. Build logs on the projects that keep moving. More of the influences written up. And whatever I end up taking apart next.

There is no version where this is done.

Built in Cheshire. Probably modified since you last visited.