For April Fools Day, 2015 we published a parody of Vox on the homepage of Overthinking It. It was an all-nighter for me, because true to form I didn’t start working on it until fairly late the night before. I’ve been a procrastinator since school, and the child is the father of the man.

I had the idea to turn on the webcam and record myself doing some of the work and talking about it. I stopped after an hour—explaining your work as you go really slows you down, and it was another four hours until I was done—but not before the skeleton of the design was on the page.

In this screencast, you can follow along as I set up the WordPress theme, and (sort of) use tools like Bower, SASS, and Compass to implement a design on OTI. This is probably only interesting to web developers.

Why on earth would I do something like this? Well, with the upcoming changes to Google’s algorithm which will punish non-mobile-friendly sites like the 2012 redesign of Overthinking It, my arm might be sufficiently twisted to actually deliver the long-overdue redesign of Overthinking It that addresses a couple of pain points in the user experience and makes the site not a shameful, horrid mess on smaller screens like phones and tablets.

I had the idea that I might make the whole redesign process into a screencast series, available to interested viewers as a monthly subscription. I talk more on the site about working as an actor than I do about my day job, but I pay the bills as a technology consultant and software engineer focusing on custom development for open-source CMSs and front-end engineering. I’ve been involved as lead or senior developer on a number of high profile redesign projects, and I have a pretty deep knowledge in process, tooling, and best practices for modern front-end development.

If you’d like to know about developing a custom WordPress theme using modern techniques—virtual machines with Vagrant, a front-end build process powered by Grunt to automatically lint, test, and process front-end assets, dependency management with Bower or Composer, custom jQuery plugin development, JavaScript best practices, performance auditing, semantic HTML, performant CSS, SEO, micro-formats—if these are skills you use in your work or your hobbies and this sort of thing could help you level up—let me know. I’ll probably get started in a week or two, so leave a comment below or mention me on Twitter and I’ll get a subscription page going.