It's really not a great design. It's just nerdy in a HN way. A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability, would use the tiniest bit of CSS to make the text readable on wide screens, and would have images for projects with a visual component. The only reason his site is appealing is because you already know who he is.
I agree it's not the most pleasant site to visit. I understand peoples desire to move the web back towards simplicity/html only with no js. But a little bit of css does not hurt and would make simple sites like this a lot more enjoyable to look at. Just my opinion..
> A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability
Why?
I am on a 27" 4k screen and that website is very readable to me. Should the text all be in a single column in the center taking 10% of the screen like 99% of blogs now?
Chronological or Alphabetical sorting would make more sense than importance.