This past month, I've been cleaning cobwebs off of my old websites, posts, libraries, projects, and all sorts of other content I've put on the internet over the years.
I've been writing posts and building websites from my bedroom ever since I was 13 years old. Learning one thing at a time, and then sharing my knowledge with the community. Most of those posts, libraries, and code are now outdated and not a reflection of who I am anymore and are effectively junk.
When I was younger, I had all the time in the world to over-engineer perfect, stunning web experiences for stuff nobody would use—and I was fine with that. It was not until my first project, kmenu, gained massive traction that I had an identity on the internet.
Throughout my life, I've put out so many different projects on so many different GitHub accounts that I've lost track. As a result, I decided to archive and private all those projects to escape the burdening feeling of bugs, domain renewals, and other issues piling up.
I'm not ashamed of my old work, rather I believe it should remain private—just for me and my eyes to reflect upon. Without the burden of maintaining it.
New Website
I want this new website, my refreshed projects, and these posts to be a reflection of who I am now, and the things I value. Not a cluster of personalities of my teenage self explored while finding his way through the world.
This website reflects my new value of finding satisfaction in simplicity, and serves as a micro-example of it. I now have a job, and countless other responsibilities. I don't have time to polish buttons to perfection, write new blog posts, or even rice my Arch Linux setup.
This new iteration of my site has practically nothing that I have to keep up to date—which is precisely what I wanted to do. I don't have a thousand NPM dependencies that I have to worry about keeping updated, or follow the new design fad.
All I want out of my personal website now is to share my work, some thoughts, and neat lil' interaction experiments that I find time to do every now and then. I want the internet to have absolutely nothing to do with my personal life anymore.
I've redesigned this so many times I stopped counting years ago. But anyway, here's to a better year ahead.
Colophon
Built with Next.js, MDX, and Tailwind CSS. Set in Inter and Fira Code. Deployed to Vercel.
As always, this website is open source.
Inspired by Gavin Nelson, Paco Coursey and Oğuz Yağız Kara.