Thus a sappling sprouts

I have wanted a personal website for years, probably a decade at this point. In that time I have built and published a few different blogs. I’ve built versions using Frontpage, Ghost, Google Blogger, Hugo, plain old HTML, and probably a few others that I have forgotten and lost to time. None of them ever felt quite right though. The static site generators often felt too limited, but I didn’t want to build an entire CMS or learn much about Wordpress plugins either.

I was inspired to finally build this website after I saw a talk by __ that centered around the need to build our own tools. For years I hesitated and worked on a blog and showcase in small fits and bursts, but I was always nervous about doing it _wrong and embarassing myself somehow. Recently, I have felt myself moving past this barrier. If artists can sell AI-generated memes with a straight face, I can publish something that I put thought and precious time into. If Anthropic can rewrite Bun in Rust in 2 weeks and publish it without shame, then I can stand to mess up a few times while making a personal oasis on the attention hungry internet.

I intend this website to be a quiet place, one I will tend like a garden as I slowly add writings and experiments over the next few years. The name wasn’t my first choice, but I think having a name is more important than having a perfect one. It will shape what this becomes, and that’s ok.

I wrote this in Elixir, the Phoenix web framework specifically. Something about the Erlang computational model has stuck around in my mind since college, and I’m familiar with Phoenix so it seemed like a good fit. In the future, I have some ideas for little demos and projects that leverage LiveView, but that will come with time.