This site is an alternative that should be the default.
It’s an alternative to active social media profiles. It’s the old web default of a literal “Home Page”.
My intention with this site is to present a version of myself on the web. 100% me, no ads or algorithms. It’s a place to learn a bit about me, a place to learn how to contact me, and a place for me to teach some of the things I’ve learned.
The useful constraints
I’m a software engineer. At my day job my teams runs a global website infrastructure that costs over a million dollars a year to operate. We handle millions of requests per day from users all over the globe. We’ve implemented CDN’s, auto-scaling, load-balancing, database and cache clusters, analytics pipelines, AI gateways, and more.
This is not that. If that is a skyscraper, this is a little wooden birdhouse.
There are no external fonts, trackers, frameworks, or required scripts. Pages are written as plain text and built into static HTML. A browser can render the whole site without waiting for an application to wake up. It’s fast and light and simple.
Photographs will be dithered into small palettes before publishing. The treatment is visible rather than invisible: a reminder that an image is a translation, and that a useful picture does not need millions of colors.
Solarpunk at a human scale
Solarpunk is often pictured as a spectacular future city. I am interested in its smaller habits too: maintaining what already exists, choosing understandable tools, sharing knowledge, and making systems that can live within real limits.
This website is one small experiment in that direction.