if you’ve been to this URL before, you already know what was here. a rotating “hello” in a few languages and not much else. a placeholder. a way of saying i exist without actually saying anything. it did the job for a while, but there’s only so long you can look at a blank page (well, it had a beautiful CSS-only construction banner) and call it a plan.
why now?
honestly, i just got tired of putting it off. i’d see other people’s sites, think “i should really set one up,” and then go right back to procrastinating. eventually, the placeholder page just started bothering me.
besides that, i’ve been long burnt out on social platforms. in current state, everything you post gets fed into an algorithm, “measured” (yeah, not at all stealing data) for engagement, and then buried in a timeline. i wanted a space on the internet that i actually control. no feed, no likes, no one deciding who gets to see what. it just sits here, exactly how i leave it.
the infrastructure
the site is built with Astro. it’s mostly pre-rendered HTML and CSS. there’s a tiny bit of JS to handle the theme toggle, a custom cursor, and some fluid scrolling physics, but the core remains static. it doesn’t need to be bloated to be effective.
more importantly, it’s mine.
i’ve been thinking lately about how much of our digital lives quietly runs through a handful of massive companies. they make things incredibly easy, and for a long time, i was perfectly happy to just rent space on their servers and push code to their repositories. but eventually, i wanted to see how the engine actually worked.
so, i’m trying something different. it’s probably more work than it needs to be, but the code for this site isn’t on GitHub anymore; it’s on my own Gitea instance, and the site served up from a reverse proxy server and edge cache. coolify helped, a lot. yes it broke sometimes (okay maybe more than sometimes), and when it did, it was entirely my oopsie.
nevertheless, there’s something deeply grounding about that. knowing exactly where your data lives, understanding the stack beneath it, and being the one responsible for keeping the lights on. it’s a humbling process, but i’m enjoying the quiet of it.
what you’ll find here
whatever i’m working through at the time. probably some mix of:
- technical notes: things i’m building, breaking, or trying to get my head around.
- learning out loud: wrong turns included.
- everything else: hobbies, books, whatever doesn’t fit anywhere else.
that last one is intentionally vague. i’m not going to promise an “essays” section that quietly collects dust.
if any of that sounds worth following, stick around. if not, there are 3 easter eggs hidden around the site. have fun on the lookout for those.
thanks for reading. more to come.