I’ve launched a personal website! But you’re here, so you already knew that.
What do I want it to be?
When I was a kid, I got obsessed with the book A Big Ball of String by Marion Holland. It tells the story of a boy who’s sick in bed and unable to do much. He finds that with his big ball of string, he can do almost anything by tying string to the object he wants to control. This was years before smart homes, so the idea of having centralized control over my bedroom was new. It immediately gripped my five year old brain and I set about copying the story’s hero. I tied two strings to my light switch (one to pull up and one to pull down) and two to my door (the one for open wrapped around the doorknob several times to spin it before pulling open the door). I tried tying a set to each of my windows, but they were too heavy for the wall tacks I was using for pulleys.
The setup crumbled after a few days. Among the culprits were substandard building materials, shoddy craftsmanship, and an inexperienced builder. But for the few days that it worked, I was enamored with the sense of self-extension. I was able to do things from bed that I would normally have to get up to do. It was problem solving and engineering. It felt powerful and magical.
I’ve always loved the idea of building and having a command center. There is just something in me that loves to systematize things and build processes. It feels almost magical to eliminate work in this way, where you’ve designed a system ahead of time so that when the time comes to “do work”, you just have to flick a wrist or tap a few keys and the thing is done for you. A place to organize all the information I find interesting. A central platform from which I can control my internet presence (to the extent that I have one, and I really don’t).
Why now?
I put off building it for a couple of reasons:
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Lack of technical ability. Until 2021, I had hardly even tried to program a computer. Standing up a personal site would have meant using something like Wordpress or Squarespace. Even before I knew anything about software, solutions like these set off my lock-in/future-proofing spidey senses. It seemed better not to build a site at all than to build one that I would grow to resent as my technical ability improved.
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Higher-priority projects. As I got better at programming, a new reason for putting off the personal site emerged: I could build much cooler things. Why would I spend my time on a blog when I could spend it building an alarm clock that gets you to the gym in the morning? Why write Markdown when I could write a webscraper that points out when Vegas misprices a football game? There were things that I wanted to see exist in the world more than my personal site. Those things got built first.
These arguments don’t hold anymore. I just finished up a batch at the Recurse Center, where I (1) dramatically improved my technical ability and (2) built a lot of those higher-priority projects. I’m also moving from the “child-like exploration” phase of my sabbatical to the “decision and commitment” phase (put less pretentiously, I’m done being funemployed and am seeking gainful employment).
So I find myself at a point where my excuses for not launching a site are no longer valid, and I have a need to communicate to others how I think and what I like to do. It’s the perfect time to launch a personal site.
What is it?
Currently, it’s just a blog. And if you’re reading this at the time of publication, it’s a pretty sparse (dare I say bad?) blog. This post is literally the only piece of content. But for the time being, it will remain a blog. I want to do writeups on the following:
- My time at Apollo
- My sabbatical
- My time at Recurse
- Build writeups on:
All this writing will take some time. Once I’m finished, I’ll consider whether I want to add more features to the site or keep it a blog.
What do I want it to be?
I think a lot of engineering-minded people dream of building the Everything Solution. If time was no object, that’s kind of what this would be. It would be my entrypoint to organizing every facet of my public life, my source of truth to the world, and the interface between me and everyone else. Below are some features I’d love to implement:
- Project Tracker, a living, always-up-to-date portfolio. The primary motivation for launching this site is to write about the things I make. If I’m already going to be recording past projects, I might as well include present and future projects, too. I’m not really sure what this would look like. Maybe a simple list of links, some kind of Kanban Board, or something else.
- Photos, to share memories and life experiences. I currently organize my photos with Google Photos. I like a lot of its features, but like with any BigCorp cloud application, the lack of control I have over my own stuff drives me crazy. I’d love to implement some photo viewer of my own and expose my photos to the world (with tiered access, of course).
- Media Consumption Feed, to show others what I’m reading, watching, listening to, etc. I imagine this being a hub that links to my Goodreads, Letterboxd, Spotify, YouTube, etc. and publishes a feed of the media I’m consuming. Like with photos, I think it would be interesting to expose this information instead of trying to keep it private.
- Location History Viewer, to remember for myself and show others where I’ve been. I love reliving trips and remembering the places I’ve visited. My current system is bad --- I try to remember to save new locations on Google Maps as I visit them. There’s way too much friction and a lot gets lost. I’d love to find or build something that tracks my location at all times and publishes that information to my site. I think it would be cool for people who know me to know where I am and where I’ve been. Privacy be damned!
- Authentication, to share different content with different viewers. I’m fine with my family being able to see where I am at all times. Ex-girlfriends, not so much.
What is it actually going to be?
Who knows? Historically speaking, my projects seem to be as susceptible to scope creep as they are to neglect and abandonment. It could and probably will end up looking a lot different than what I’ve outlined here. I hope it does.