Hello World - Starting this website

Hi 👋.

I’ve wanted to create my own personal website for some time. Ever since high school I’ve always played around with and edited websites, but I don’t remember having my own space.

This is my online space.

I am self-hosting it. I am worried about how centralised the operation and control of the internet has become. I have a good internet connection and a Lenovo ThinkCentre M80q Gen 4 mini PC, so I’m setting the site up to run from there.

The M80q is running Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) at the moment, and I’ll likely install a Kubernetes (k3s maybe?) host inside that. While a little overkill for the needs of this website, I want to learn more about Kubernetes and grow my knowledge in its ecosystem of tools. EDIT: I skipped that step for now and used Dokploy, which when I worked out the issue with VIPs and dnsrr - it works a treat!

Connecting to the internet is likely to initially be using a Cloudflare tunnel. I’m loath to do that, but it’s my easiest option to get started until I find a good non-US option that I can use without compromising my home internet security.

I will use it to learn and experiment. One of the benefits (for me) of our surge of GenAI-powered developer tooling is that I’m coding more. However, that coding has all been at $work, and I want to have something that I can explore personally, so this will be part of that outlet. I will use it to build some browser-based tools, refresh my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge, and generally experiment in my personal time.

The tech stack. In addition to self-hosting, I’ve decided to build this using Astro. Self-described as “the web framework for content-driven websites”, it seemed like a good fit here. My JavaScript/TypeScript skills are probably my strongest, and I can easily plug in React or dynamic components when I want to (using Astro’s Islands concept). I did think about describing the decision-making and exploration more, but I want to explore it some more first and see how it goes.

I also have some side-goals of improving my writing skills, perhaps note-taking as I learn how to do things, and serving as a bit of a digital archive for things I want to remember.

Ultimately, I expect this to adapt and evolve.

Finally, a shout-out to some inspiration:

I like the way Simon Willison has used his personal website almost as a notebook.
I’ve stumbled over Sam Rose’s website a few times, and always left appreciative of the minimalist style and in awe of his “interactive essays”, especially this one on load balancing.
The personal websites of Matej Hrescak, RJ Clarke (the timecapsule feature is cool!) and Tom Critchlow were all great design style inspiration as I researched.