Refreshing GPCData.com — How I Did It (With a Little Help)

If you've visited GPCData.com before, you may have noticed it was looking a bit long in the tooth. The old site was built on ASP.NET WebForms, a technology that dates back to the early 2000s. It worked, but it was showing its age, and maintaining it had become more trouble than it was worth. It was long overdue for a refresh. And the perfect motivation came along at just the right time. I'll explain that in a minute.

The new site is built on ASP.NET Core with Blazor Server -- Microsoft's current web framework -- running on .NET 8. The structure is cleaner, the code is simpler, and it's much easier to add new content going forward, including the blog you're reading right now.

Here's the part I want to be honest about: I didn't do this alone.

I used Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, as a coding collaborator throughout the project. Not as a code generator I blindly copied from, but as a working partner -- someone to think through design decisions with, write and debug code with, and catch things I missed.

The experience was genuinely useful in ways I didn't fully anticipate. Claude helped with the Blazor page structure, the database service layer, the blog rendering pipeline using Markdown, and the deployment configuration. When something broke -- and things always break -- having a second set of eyes that could read the code and reason about it was valuable.

Was it perfect? No. There were moments where I had to push back, redirect, or simply override a suggestion that didn't fit the way I work or the constraints of shared hosting. But that's true of any collaboration. The key was staying in the driver's seat and treating Claude's output as a starting point, not a finished product.

And there was an awful lot of meta learning as well.

• Writing prompts that elicited usable responses
• Asking probing questions before accepting an offering
• Making sure we kept our T's crossed and our I's dotted and the niggly details carefully recorded in memory

To name just a few items.

The result is a site I'm happy with -- cleaner, faster, and easier to maintain. And a workflow I'll keep using.

More posts coming. There's a lot to talk about.