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.