Why I Built a Personal Website

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.

The honest truth is that I’m a people person. The site exists so people can find me, read what I’m working on, and reach me. Everything past that is decoration I’d have to maintain. Cutting the decoration isn’t a style choice — it’s the same instinct that makes a good requirements doc short. Say the thing. Let the reader move on.

But I think I have good ideas to share and a creative mind behind the technical abstractions. I’m inquisitive to a fault and constantly on the hunt to learn more, do better work, and be more useful to the people around me.