there’s no longer any particularly good reason for you to not have a personal website

Or at least not if the thing stopping you was that it would be kinda hard

I think it is neat when people have websites. It’s not, like, fundamentally all that important of a thing, but I think it’s definitely neat. My website is apriiori.com, which hosts slightly better-featured versions of my Substack posts, as well as a handful of random assorted projects like my NeetCode progress or a link to a random Super Mario 64 ROM-hacking collaboration I technically contributed to. Surprisingly few of my friends¹¹ Using a construal of friend narrow enough to mostly only include people I have either met up with in person, or perhaps people who I’ve known for many years and worked on major projects with. Probably if you looked through, like, the entire set of people with whom I occasionally have cordial conversations on Twitter, you could put together a few more than this!

I suppose my mom has one. have done this: after a relatively deep ponder, I think I could list about six or seven²² I swear I’m not doing a bit, this originally said “five or six” and then I thought of an additional one I’m pretty sure I hadn’t thought of before.?

My previous blocker was, presumably, that despite having a computer science degree and all that I didn’t really know how to do it. Or maybe I had some sort of idea of many of the steps in the abstract — I do have to imagine that if there were some important reason that I had to put together a website, I would have been able to manage it eventually — but lacked a concrete enough grasp to ever make it feel worth filling in the remaining details enough to actually put the whole project together.

But nowadays, you can mostly just get walked through every necessary step by an LLM, and then either work through the details yourself or even get an LLM to help with some portion of them. I suppose I probably would’ve found it substantially more difficult if I had somewhat less technical experience — it made a difference that I at least had used GitHub before, even if I never really got used to using git on a command line or anything. Personally I found it incredibly approachable, though!

You do, of course, need some sort of content to put on the website. I think most people don’t really have a catalogue running back a decade consisting of a bunch of random projects they put together for some reason, but I don’t really understand why. Like, if you don’t have blog posts because you find blogging difficult, that makes sense to me. I too had a very hard time breaking into blogging, and unless I have a serious blogging habit at a particular time I tend to just not post anything for months. Also, even when I do have a serious blogging habit, I end up releasing too many of my posts ridiculously close to midnight³³ I have a bit of a problem. I am working on it. I spent a lot of time today making progress on blog posts other than this one, it’s just probably going to be a few more days before I’ve studied up on the Hodge Conjecture enough to say anything intelligent about it, okay? For some reason I thought wrapping my head around the rest of the Millennium Problems was going to be easy.. But the random projects accumulating over years, I don’t see how anyone doesn’t end up with that. What do you do with all your free time? But I digress.

Merely having the website and knowing I could publish something has led to me putting together a few things that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. I don’t know if other people have a similar issue, where they don’t create things primarily due to lacking any particular place to publish them — but to the extent people do, I think it would be pretty worthwhile for them to go put together a website! I would like to see what happens when people I know stop being constrained by their public output having to fit into formats like “video”, “tweet”, or “blog post”. You can make arbitrary things that don’t fit into the formats that social media tries to push you into! There are other options!