In my second year at HTL Krems, 2021, I embarked on a project that combined two things I’ve always been passionate about: creating my own website and finding better ways to organize the endless flow of school material. Like many students, my notes were scattered across OneNote, Word files, Excel sheets, Google Drive, and even tools like Witeboard. The chaos was overwhelming, making it difficult to focus on learning effectively.
Driven by the vision of streamlining this process—not just for me, but also for my classmates—I decided to create a centralized platform to summarize school content. My goal was twofold: simplify studying and inspire motivation among my peers.
At that time, I wasn’t aware of frameworks that could make building documentation-style websites easier. Instead, I relied on plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to craft the first versions of what I called Schneider IT. Although I loved working on it, my early attempts were clunky—generating the table of contents and sidebar dynamically with my own JavaScript code resulted in painfully slow load times. It took 10 seconds or more for everything to render!
Despite the setbacks, I kept iterating. By 2023, I had created and discarded about 10 versions of the site, always searching for a cleaner design and more efficient management system. The site’s potential was clear to me, but its usability wasn’t there yet.
That’s when I stumbled upon Starlight, a powerful and amazing framework created by Chris Swithinbank (@delucis) for building fast, Markdown-driven websites. Discovering Starlight was a turning point—it allowed me to blend two things I’m passionate about: creating websites and using Markdown for its simplicity and elegance.
With the transition to Starlight, Schneider IT evolved into Mutanuq. The new name marked a fresh start and reflected the streamlined, modernized website it had become. I rewrote everything, optimized the site’s performance, and focused on creating content tailored specifically to my classmates’ needs, especially for upcoming tests.
The transformation paid off. Friends began using the website regularly and gave enthusiastic feedback like, “Bro, this website looks awesome!” Mutanuq wasn’t just a tool for exams—it became a trusted resource for my peers and a personal archive for all the knowledge I wanted to preserve beyond school.
Thanks to Starlight, managing and expanding Mutanuq became effortless, and the project grew into something I’m proud to maintain even today. What started as Schneider IT—a small idea to organize my notes—blossomed into Mutanuq, a platform that simplifies learning for others while preserving valuable knowledge for my future self.