Background

As I come up on one year since the accident that broke my nose, I’ve been reflecting on what’s changed. I think it’s important to take stock sometimes — to give yourself a yardstick for what you’ve done well or not so well, even if I’m not always great at actually doing it. One saying that’s been stuck in my head lately: “life happens to you, or you happen to life.”

The Accident

I honestly haven’t been into biking that long. A former housemate got me into it — I’d always been vaguely interested but never bothered to invest in something quality, something that was actually a joy to ride. I’m deeply grateful to him for selling me his old bike and “bike-pilling” me, as he liked to say.

The Problem

There are things I want to know about my mom that I’ve never asked — not because I don’t care, but because the moment never quite arrives, or I assume there will be more time, or life moves fast enough that I forget until something reminds me again. I suspect most people have a version of this problem. The questions pile up quietly, and the people who could answer them get older, and at some point you realize the window is shorter than you thought.

So I built a small tool to fix it.

What It Does

Reich Memories sends questions to family members on a randomized schedule — a few per week, via email (hopefully Signal eventually as well) — and saves their replies to a private searchable archive.

Why This Site

I’m not a developer. I’m a business analyst — I spend my days mapping workflows, writing test scripts, sitting in rooms where eight stakeholders need to agree on what a button does. So when I set out to make a personal site, I wasn’t trying to make a statement about web design. I wanted the thing to work, and I wanted to be able to maintain it myself a year from now without re-learning a framework.

Brutalism, for me, is mostly a utility argument. Left-aligned text, system fonts, real links. If I want to add a page, I copy an existing one, change the words, and put it on the server. That’s the whole workflow.

It also matches how I think about my home infrastructure. I run my own stuff — calendar, tasks, media, a Loomio instance for a group I help organize — because I want to know where things live and how to get them back if something breaks. Own the data, prefer local over cloud, choose tools you can still run when the company behind them pivots or folds. A personal site should follow the same logic. One folder. Plain files. If the host disappears tomorrow, I move the folder somewhere else and I’m done.