Why bother having a website

Most of what I’ve written since college lives somewhere I don’t control. A post on Medium, a note on LinkedIn, an explainer on dev.to when I actually finished something. Different platforms, different rules about what’s worth saying there, and none of it in one place. I’m not sure I could find half of it again if I tried.

An engineer teaching a system design course once said that keeping your own website is close to the minimum a software engineer should do. Not a portfolio with a hero image and a stock photo of a laptop, just somewhere that’s yours and doesn’t disappear because a platform changed its algorithm.

He was right, but that isn’t really why I’m doing this. The real reason is that a website like this ends up being a diary. Not the version written for an audience, closer to the one written for myself with the door left open.

So this is going up here instead of on whatever platform is next. Not because it’ll get more readers (it probably won’t), but because it’ll still be here when I go looking for it.