Hello, world (again)

About once per decade, I end up writing a new personal website.

The first one appeared in 2002. I was 12 years old, just started programming at school, and desperately wanted to learn web development in the era of dial-up internet and HTML 4.0. It began as a single static HTML page, then slowly evolved into PHP a few years later. Before Facebook existed, we used personal home pages, phpBB forums, and LiveJournal to share things online.

In 2013, I realized that I needed a proper website to host materials for my university students. PHP felt painful by then, and I was already actively using Ruby on Rails, so I wrote my own CMS and deployed it on a VPS. It worked — and for a long time.

About ten years later, it became clear that maintaining this old codebase was more effort than joy. I am not a professional web developer, and I mostly want things to just work. At the same time, I was curious about how web development had evolved over the past decade, so I went through React and Next.js tutorials and even built a quiz system for my students using this stack.

Eventually, I realized that I need yet another homepage — this time for new goals. I decided to keep it as simple as possible, focusing on ease of maintenance rather than cleverness.

And once there is a homepage, a blog naturally follows.

So here we are 🙂