Finally, after so many years, Website version 3.1 has been launched! The first question you might be wondering is: where is version 3.0? Well, that's kind of a long story. But since you are here, you might want to read it. If not, feel free to scroll past it to the release notes.
So, a long time ago I was part of a development group called GigaDev, which I founded together with some friends after I came up with a project that was initially called newForum but eventually was renamed to GigaForum. And for a while, we had a lot of fun developing various things, but mostly we worked on GigaForum. During the development, I created my own framework, which was heavily inspired by CodeIgniter and later on Laravel. Cause honestly, I felt like I missed things in both frameworks. Most of all, the ability to have a single codebase for many projects. A thing we heavily depended on.
So you might be asking yourself, what does this have to do with Version 3.0? Well, a lot. Because after we broke apart (because life happens), I needed to find a job. I had been working mostly full-time for GigaDev (for free). And since I had this wonderful framework, I decided to make my website using that framework. And that eventually became Version 2.0. I eventually found a job at Janssens Field Services (probably not because of my website). And I made the last update to the site in 2017 when I introduced tools.juje.co.
But also in 2017, I started working on the second iteration of a new project, which I called GigaHome. GigaHome was basically Evernote or Notion with some more social features. For that project, I overhauled a lot of the original framework that we used for GigaForum. For instance, I pulled the main libraries into a package called GigaCore and I created an empty framework which I named GigaFrame. And the idea was that I could use those for more projects. GigaHome itself was going to live inside a repo called the GigaEngine. In the end, I lost interest in GigaHome, but I regained my interest again to start working on my new website in 2020. But this time I wanted to use the GigaFrame, and this is how I started working on Version 3.0.
But after a while, I lost interest again (and life happened). But this gave me time to think, because the problem with building a website using a custom framework is that you have to maintain the framework and your website. So in 2024, I decided to fully ditch the GigaFrame and use Laravel. Because I've gained a lot of knowledge by using Laravel at work. Not just that, all the shortcomings I thought Laravel had I now knew how to overcome them.
So, full of motivation, I started working on what I now called Version 3.1. Because the design you look at was designed in Version 3.0 (yes, about 6 years ago). And some other internal ideas also got transferred over into 3.1. But again, this motivation was also short-lived. And throughout 2025, I worked on 3.1 whenever I felt like it. But on April 18 of 2026, I decided I really wanted to see this project come to life. So I decided that I'm going to work on it until it's live. And that brings us to today, August 28 of 2026.
So you might be wondering what is new.
Well, here is a list of the changes on the front end:
But the biggest change isn't any of these things above. It's how the pages are created. Because the entire site is now statically generated. And nope, I'm not using Markdown as most people do. I created an entire admin section where I'm able to use a WYSIWYG editor to create the posts. And after I save a post, a GitLab (Self Hosted) pipeline will be triggered to regenerate the website (this happens in about 5 seconds).
Well, Tools.Juje. Right now tools.juje.co still uses the old design. So that, of course, is going to be the biggest priority. The biggest change for Tools.Juje is also that some things will be moved into Experiments.Juje. Because some things on tools.juje.co were not really tools, but they were experiments. So after Tools.Juje launches, I will work on Experiments.Juje. Do note that I will likely release 1 tool at a time (and I might even create a blog post about it).
After those things are released, I've completed my original MVP goal (aka upgrading everything I already had). So after the MVP, I'm thinking of the following things:
So as you can see, there is still a lot to do. So honestly, I'm just hoping I can stay motivated enough to add these things.
So with that said, I hope I see you in the next one!
~Jurjen