This site exists because I’m stubborn.

For years, I wrote on platforms that were convenient, polished, and easy to use. They also never quite felt like mine.

That’s not really a criticism. Those platforms solve real problems. They handle the design, the publishing, the infrastructure, all the technical stuff most people don’t want to think about. But that’s also the tradeoff. The layout is already decided. The features are already chosen. You can decorate the room, but you don’t own the building.

Eventually, that started bothering me.

I wanted a place where every choice was mine, even the bad ones. A small corner of the internet that actually belonged to me, not something I was borrowing.

The push came from a weirdly mundane place: I realized my student email still worked.

Out of curiosity, I poked around the GitHub Student Developer Pack and found a pile of free tools I didn’t fully understand but immediately wanted to mess with. Somewhere in there, I found a recommendation for Hugo and GitHub Pages. I hadn’t used either. At that point, “deploying a website” still sounded like something real developers did.

Naturally, I decided to try it anyway.

The first few days felt like wandering through a city without a map. Every guide assumed I already knew three things I didn’t. Every fix introduced two new problems. I broke the site repeatedly, fixed it slowly, then broke it again in a completely different way.

I didn’t build the structure from scratch. Hugo handled most of that, and I started with PaperMod as a base. My focus was on making it feel like mine. I stripped away the clutter, wrote custom CSS (which swallowed the vast majority of my time and debugging), put together a color palette lifted from Nord, and spent way too long on fonts. Then I grabbed a domain, which felt more intimidating than any of the technical steps for reasons I still can’t fully explain. Connected everything, held my breath a little.

One evening, it worked. Yay!

No ads. No platform branding. No algorithm deciding what surfaces. Just a website sitting on the internet because I put it there.

There’s a Last.fm widget on the homepage showing what I’m currently listening to. It serves no practical purpose whatsoever, which is exactly why I like it.

What surprised me wasn’t the website itself. It was how good it felt to build something and figure things out along the way.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by. More soon.