Why I Built This Website
A Corner of the Internet That Is Mine
This website began with a practical reason. I had finished my studies and needed a portfolio for the next stage of my career. I wanted one place to present my projects, experience and skills while applying for jobs.
I could have built a conventional portfolio with a short introduction, my CV and a collection of project pages. That would have done the job. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I wanted to build something larger.
I did not only want a website about what I can do. I wanted one about who I am.
My LinkedIn profile presents the professional version of me. It shows my work, education and experience as an engineer. That version is accurate, but incomplete. It leaves out the person who exists in daily life. The person who travels, listens to music, reads, takes photographs and spends far too much time thinking about small details. Instagram appears to offer space for that other side, but I gradually stopped using it for much beyond contacting friends. Posting began to feel like pressure. If I wanted to share something, I felt that I had to select and edit everything perfectly. If I was not posting, I could easily lose time scrolling through an endless stream of reels and stories.
The strange thing is that I do like being public. I like sharing parts of my life, and part of me would still enjoy creating a really cool social media account. I want my friends to see photographs I never posted. I want colleagues to meet the person who exists beyond my work. I even like the idea that a stranger could enter through one page and understand something small but real about me. What I wanted was a calmer way to do that.
This website is selectively public. It does not contain everything, and it is not meant to.
Instead, I can choose the memories and thoughts that feel worth carrying forward. A visitor does not need to face an overwhelming feed, and I do not need to turn every experience into content. The travel page is one example. I deliberately chose only one photograph for each city. It is the image that best summarises how that place felt to me. Each photograph is paired with the first sentence that enters my mind when I remember the city.
I also did not want those memories to sit inside a plain page of text. The map lets someone choose a place to explore, while the pinboard makes each photograph feel like something kept rather than uploaded. That page deserves its own story. Here, it simply represents how I want the whole website to work: not as a complete record, but as a collection of carefully chosen fragments.
I wanted the website itself to feel interesting. The colours, movements, reactions and interactions all matter to me. Designing them is another way of deciding how I want the space to feel. Even a small reaction at the bottom of a page can change whether the site feels mechanical or alive. The wish to build something like this had been there for a long time. The difficulty was translating the ideas in my head into something I could actually make. I am not a frontend developer, although I understand how production software should be delivered. Many of my visual ideas felt too ambitious for my available time and specialist skills.
AI helped me close that gap. I could finally experiment with interactions and visual details that would previously have taken too much time for me to build alone.
I do not see this website as a finished portrait of who I am today. I think of it as a place for looking back at a life. I want it to grow alongside me, carrying memories, thoughts and earlier versions of myself as I continue to change. Years from now, I hope I can return to it and remember where I travelled, what I was learning, what I cared about and how I understood my life at the time. If you have found your way here, I hope you enjoy looking through it. Perhaps you will understand me a little better, or find an idea to carry into your own career, life or corner of the internet.