Some plans you carry around for years without ever tackling them. This website was one of those for me for a long time. How an idea I kept putting off finally became what you see in front of you is what I want to tell here.
Why a site of my own
I had owned this domain for a while, and I wanted a place of my own where I could record my life for others to see. Facebook and social media in general are not a real alternative for me. They are very fast-paced, and beyond a brief hit of dopamine, little tends to stick that makes a person truly tangible.
Platforms like LinkedIn offer more, but they make it hard to express yourself the way you would like to. You fill in preset fields and end up disappearing into the same template as everyone else. Off-the-shelf products on the market had more features, yet they stayed just as limited in many areas. So in the end only one path felt genuinely right, namely taking a framework that gives me almost complete freedom to show myself and my personality. And still I did not get going. I was frustrated with the standstill, and the sheer range of options together with the effort I assumed behind it paralysed me so much that I kept postponing the whole thing.
The push that was missing
I had known all of this for a long time. What was missing was the moment I actually started. It came in early June at a seminar. In a personal conversation, the seminar leader asked me what I was really planning, and I answered truthfully that it was this website, the one I had been putting off for years. He would not let go and kept asking why I had not done it so far. That single question, asked again and again, was the small but decisive nudge I had needed. Not long after, I sat down to the first concrete concept and put it in writing. At last the project was in motion.
The idea behind it
From the start the site was meant to be more than a list. I wanted to bring my projects, tools and skills together into a shared fabric where everything references everything else, so you can jump from a project to the skills behind it and back again. I will admit the CV was somewhat of an afterthought at first. Over time it has become, just like the certificates, an ever more natural part of this overall picture.
The little things make the difference
Over weeks I fed more and more content into the test environment and reworked the design and the features until it all felt right. Looking back, it was not so much the big, obvious elements like the graph or the timeline that needed the most polish. It is the many small details that you barely notice consciously and that are what make a site feel whole in the first place.
Built static and put live
One decision was firm for me from the very start. The site should be built statically, meaning it consists of finished files that are already complete before the first visit. That keeps the load on the server low, but above all it removes any uncertainty, because what I see locally on my machine is character for character the same thing that later reaches you in the browser. That reliability was worth more to me than any feature that would only have introduced new sources of error in the background.
When I reached a state I was happy with in early July, I turned to the path from my local machine to the server. Behind it sits a pipeline that I set up once and that takes the work off my hands afterwards. As soon as I push a change to my self-hosted Git, it rebuilds the site by itself and places the result directly where it gets served. Because I have set up such workflows often enough over the years, that was done quickly.
In short, I write something, save it, and without any further action it stands online for everyone to see a little later.
I hope you like what you see here. Feel free to click through the projects, the skills and the CV, and take your time, because in many corners small details are waiting to be discovered. This website is itself one of those projects, where I have documented how it is built. And because the site keeps growing, the next visit is worth it too.