When prioritizing creating a personal website, it never quite measured up to raising little humans, maintaining a home that is pleasant to live in, financial concerns, health and wellbeing, and supporting my spouse. Oh, and a social life. And hobby engagement. Certainly can’t forget to add work to the list. I also volunteer.
I should just stop listing things or I’ll never finish this post.
I spent a lot of time in 2025 trying to shed responsibility where I had the ability to do so, and to also invest in those things that are force-multipliers for wellbeing. The three choices that have enabled me to set aside the time to be here typing away were:
- Modulating my hobbies to not require time and attention on a daily basis. Where possible, extend this as long as is practical.
- Continuing sobriety. Dry January in 2024 turned into Dry 2024, Dry 2025, and Dry Forever. I never really had a major problem, but abstaining has had enough positive results.
- Counseling has been a healthy source of venting stress and gaining insight into life in general.
So, time to create.
Why?
Motivation is a mix between personal and professional desires. On the personal side, I don’t participate in social media but still want a place to present things that matter to me. Professionally, this site is a chance to demonstrate my various skills.
How?
Common choices these days are Medium, Substack, GitHub Pages. I want quite a bit of control over the design, technology, and user experience with room to flex technically, so I decided to forgo these options. Thankfully, the state of website development in 2026 made this straightforward. Quick look at what is powering this site:
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- I was not happy when Microsoft bought them, but I am content with the direction it has taken and believe things are better than ever for GitHub. For a development environment, Codespaces has a free tier that is compelling.
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- Using Workers. Why not GitHub Pages? More features within Cloudflare even on the free tier. DNS, Analytics, Databases, WAF, etc. There is a Terraform provider, as well.
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- Content-driven development, minimal JavaScript. I’ve never been a huge fan of static site generators, really not for any specific reason that I can pinpoint. They feel a bit bloated, perhaps? Astro’s island architecture and content collections have won me over, though.
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- Coupling styling with HTML isn’t for everyone, but I find that it works for me.
What comes next?
I’m not here to drive click and view volume; I want the content to speak for itself. I still find it motivating to put some self-imposed expectations on post frequency. Once a month seems reasonable, but if I don’t have anything of decent value to post, you can expect to see hobby-related content.
See you in the future,
Max