Building this site part I: Why build a blog in 2025?
It has long been my intention to rebuild my personal site. I've on-and-off had a blog since roughly 2009 when I first started to wax poetic on a WordPress site about something or other a liberal arts college student felt compelled to say. Then, as I navigated a career change from I/O psych into software engineering, building my first website was almost a rite of passage as I learned how to code professionally. It served me well as a means to grow and share what I was doing. Something to fiddle around with. At some point around 2020, I let my domain names lapse and the site went away. I still have that Jekyll site in my GitHub, will probably migrate that legacy content over at some point, but for now, here, a fresh start.
When my first child was born earlier this year, I naively thought that paternity leave would be a great time to rebuild my personal site. Great idea! As anyone who has been a first-time parent can tell you, that idea was delusional. Assuming you are in an equitable relationship with your partner, learning to live with and take care of an infant is a round-the-clock endeavor. Leisurely free time to indulge in hobbies stops to exist. At least for a while.
When my leave ended in late summer, we crested the 6-month mark, we got into a rhythm with childcare, and—most importantly—our infant started sleeping through the night (!!!). It seemed like a good opportunity to go for it. And unsurprisingly in mid-2025, an opportune way to explore the exploding world of AI coding tools (more on this in later posts).
The inevitable question: Why build a personal website in 2025? Why not just use one of the many platforms out there to share? What's the point of writing when AI could just write for you, or, if you do actually do the writing yourself, it will just get gobbled up by LLM training? (more on that last point in [LINK TO OTHER POST]) Really, it's a mix of things.
A lot of the people that I look up to—both in the world of software, and more broadly—have a common thread of creative output. They have blogs, podcasts, newsletters, etc. They try things out and put themselves out there, usually where more focus and depth can be placed on interesting topics that simply could not exist in the swamp that is algorithmically-driven internet platforms. Of course many of these people are very accomplished and manage to produce larger creative efforts that are published or otherwise shared in some way to a larger audience.
Not to say I have much serious ambition there, but it does seem that the best way to get started is to put in the reps in lower-stakes venues. It comes down to a desire to share. To share ideas. To share things I create. Certainly, I dabble with mediocrity across many different interests, and I'm sure it shows, but my aim is to explore different things and get better.
Finally, this is absolutely a form of nostalgia for early Web 2.0. This is me going analog, creating my own little corner of the internet that isn't a part of some larger platform.