I got my first email address more than 20 years ago, made by my parents so I could receive all the finest "memes" and email chains from family and friends, and to create accounts on games and forums. It's nothing special for kids nowadays, but back then I was one of the very few in my school with internet access at home.
Email addresses are a crucial part of our online life: we use them everywhere, on every account we create on every platform, and to communicate with other people or subscribe to newsletters. Having one single address is convenient, since whether it's friends, family or your tax agency, everyone can reach you at the same place. Handy, right?
I haven't used that first address as my primary email for over a decade, but it still exists and will probably outlive me. Because I wasn't so careful as a kid, it quickly started to receive spam, so I was more cautious with my next @live.fr address, sharing it less and keeping the old one for anything I considered junk. I still do this today: a primary email, and a bunch of junk ones.
First long-format for this blog, documenting my journey building it. I'm quite happy to be finally doing this, and what better time to start than a Saturday morning at 6am after researching the topic all night.
Keeping myself up-to-date with static websites generation tooling, oh and, because I want to write stuff down and share on the Internet, sometimes, as some sort of an archive for my life adventures.
In the past 20 years, I've iterated many times over building personal websites (or for the plethora of projects where I told myself "This needs a website!"). It all started by learning HTML in the early 2000s with the help of my mother (who was working as an IT administrator, IBM AS/400 Operator and later administrating the intranet of an international shipping corporation, quite a cheat-code to learn CS as a kid!) to PHP when I wanted to do more advanced websites for my private WoW & Lineage 2 servers, and of course the plenty of CMS and forum softwares that exists (ever heard of Joomla?).
Of course, Wordpress would be the easy choice, it's mature, battle-tested, has a massive community and ecosystem allowing you to do pretty much everything you want with, and I even have an entire set of Kubernetes charts made for a previous project, meaning I could have a production ready instance deployed in 30min. But we're not here to make things easy for ourselves, today we do my favorite sin: we over-engineer (kinda).