In march 2018 I launched the ninth generation of my personal website. This site you are browsing now has come a long way from the website I did in 1997. That first one was built with MS Frontpage, in Spanish, with the terrible designs from the early web and the content you may expect from a nerdy teenager. Over time, I grow personally and professionally and the website reflected those changes. For some periods of time I was very productive and had awesome design and content. Some other times I was too busy with my life and I kept just an empty online presence. What started as a vehicle of my expression over 20 years ago ended up being my profession. Therefore this site is a big part of me.
Each time I rebooted the site I started afresh. This being a personal site I could afford to archive the content and throw the design to the paper bin. I never had the goal of building a brand around myself therefore I wrote freely over whatever I was interested at the moment. I lost my audience with a full reboot I did over 10 years ago. Since then, I welcome just a few random visits a day, wanderers who venture past the first page of Google results.
Goals
Focus on the content. I’m old enough to have interesting opinions to share. I also want to write about how I work and what I learn. I write publically to focus my thoughts, gain accountability and help visitors get an undistorted, unsweetened image of me. I don’t track users. I don’t promote. I don’t invest. I don’t sell products. If there is any value on this little corner of the web for you, it is not a fancy layout. It is the content I write.
Long term focus. It makes me sad thinking about all the time and effort I invested wasted on this site over the last 20 years. Even though most of the content was absolute garbage I occasionally wrote pieces that resonated over the web. I do have backups, but each generation was built with a different tech stack and recovering some of those outdated pieces is not worth the effort. I want the content I write from now on, to stay there on the next site iteration.
At some point around 12 years ago, I felt comfy enough with my broken English to stop writing in Spanish. Nowadays I sound weird to both Spanish and English native speakers. I am slowly getting equally chaotically fluent in German therefore I want to play nightmare mode and start writting short pieces in German.