Ten years of this site

In August 2014, during my transition from studying mathematics in Sydney to working in tech in Tel Aviv, I deployed the first version of my personal website. The site looked pretty similar ten years ago to how it looked yesterday, the main difference being that every post had a photograph at the top, of some different part of the world I had travelled to. These photos were quite nice, and a little differentiating feature from other bland text-based personal websites of tech folks, but at some point around five years ago, I decided to conform to the unwritten international bland text-based personal website standard, and removed the images, justifying it with my desire for a minimalist aesthetic, and improved loading times.

Over the years, I have mostly felt good about this site, but there have been moments when I have not been particularly happy with it. Having a site on the public internet is a real “putting yourself out there” kind of thing, something that at times feels uncomfortable. Particularly over a period of ten years, there are things I wrote about in the past that I have since learned are wrong, or misguided, or should be done completely differently. It’s tempting to delete them - and I have removed a few of the lower quality posts from the site over the years - but I think “blemishes and all” is the best way to go, as there is value in demonstrating your learning process, of “working in public”. When I think about it this way, I feel proud of having polished this little corner of the web into something that really feels like it’s my own.

I hope I still find myself writing here in another ten years’ time. I wonder if by then I will have given into the urge to redesign the site using Hugo instead of Jekyll¹, which will presumably be ancient technology in 2034 (though there are an awful lot of PHP sites still up and running today, so who knows).

And for now I have brought the images back. Life is too short, and the internet is too precious a thing, to not add a little bit of colour when you can. Who else are these little corners of the web we build for, after all?

Footnotes