Why I built this website

Back in the days, I worked through the fast.ai resources to learn about neural networks for computer vision. Jeremy Howard stated somewhere that everyone should have a personal blog or website. They also offered a nice GitHub template called fastpages which made it too easy. Write some Markdown, the GitHub pipelines were ready to go, and boom, there was a github.io page.

Compared to the quirky website builders on some shady website I used during school, I somehow owned the website. And this feeling of wanting to own my little home in the interwebs was sparked again when I joined the Fediverse on Mastodon. My fosstodon.org instance is clearly biased towards a personal website, and the enthusiasm grabbed.

Pointing people to my short redick.cc domain vs. sharing my LinkedIn or Facebook profile is just so much smoother. To be honest, I also was a little jealous of my friend, who has a super short email address. So I went and bought my domain, which is cheaper for a whole year than almost any streaming service for a year. I cleaned up the deprecated fastpages template to a minimal Jekyll setup, which builds again, and found my little home in the WWW.

It feels like my own little garden, which I can harvest; people might judge, but I decide when and what to write. I can keep it forever, and might even move —it’s just markdown.