I’ve re-written this post a few times during development.

When I first started building my website it was clear to me why I was going through such a hassle in the age of LLMs and massified slop. I had prepared a whole pretentious spiel about the importance of writing without LLMs “help” and reading things made by humans, I don’t really remember what was the connection but I also had written a long paragraph about how imposing limitations into your writing can be an interesting thing, like how twitter (or git commit title messages) character limitation naturally lead to more concise and punchy writing.

But as time passed, my reasoning became less clear and I collected many other half-truths that could be passed as reasons for building a website: I would like to get better at writing, it would be useful when looking for a job (debatable), as a programmer I needed to have one (stupid), I like the idea of having a place to share things with friends and strangers alike¹, etc. A part of me also likes the idea of an indie internet with scrappy blogs, rss feeds and over stylized pages to the point of illegibility.²

I think I still believe in all those reasons to some degree, but after many hours debugging my design and learning way too many cursed javascript facts I inevitably found myself looking for motivation, and I didn’t find it on some ideological hill I could die on, I found it somewhere simpler. I just like to build stuff (and maybe I’m really bad at leaving things unfinished).

Against my better judgement I spent many hours building my own website to mixed reviews of the final result³, adding to the noise of every developer looking for a job with their own shitty blog that will never be read but will still be scraped to train LLMs. Speaking of which, will anyone even read my posts? I don’t have social media so my public would probably be limited to friends whom, following their track record, are incapable of reading anything I send them that is bigger than 3 lines. If a tree falls in the woods but there is no one there to hear it, is my post a shit take on python typing? There is some merit in writing for oneself or simply for the exercise of writing, but my teachers made sure that such nuances would be lost on me so I’ m curious to see if in a few years this blog will have died due to neglect like a tamagotchi stuck in the back of a drawer. Who knows, maybe I become a big member of the blogosphere after some overengineered shitpost goes viral on hackernews.

So I don’t really have an answer as to why bother making your own website, if anyone asked for tips I would probably dissuade them and suggest playing video games instead.  I don’t know if I will ever have a definitive answer as to why build a website and why I built one, but for now I think I built one because I wanted to and I will write some things even if it turns out I’m just screaming into the void. Who knows, maybe the void screams back (..if I bother implementing a comment section).