Welcome to my site, stranger! Happy to have you here.

My first “home page” went online shortly after I got access to the Internet, which was approximately in 1997. I’ve maintained my site through high school first using Microsoft Frontpage, then later I taught myself HTML and CSS to design my web page. Back in the day, everybody had their personal space, for example, with a link section to other interesting sites. Geocities was big.

At some point, I picked up PHP and MySQL and started to program real websites. Around that time, blogging began to become popular, and with the advent of social media, the personal home page slowly died.

Fast forward to 2020: I’ve recently found an article describing a personal blog as a “digital garden”. The concept itself is presented in more detail by Tom Critchlow. He talks about subdividing one’s personal space into three categories: streams, campfires, and gardens. The first two are quick streams of thoughts (think Twitter) and longer-form conversations with other people, e.g. social media or conversations in the blogosphere. The natural chronological ordering gives all of the conversations a structure, but the importance of these types of contents will most likely fade away with time.

A digital garden, however, is something that lasts. It is meant for deeper and longer-term thinking. Just by wandering through a digital garden (one’s ideas, thoughts, and valuable information), inspiration can happen at any time. New ideas emerge that will get added to the garden eventually. One might think of it as a personal Wikipedia.

For me, another key aspect of the digital garden metaphor is the idea of “non-performative blogging”: Too often I read about the importance of building one’s brand through blogging and content marketing. Everything needs to be polished, SEO’d, and Instagram’d to perfection. But this takes away all the fun. Blogging becomes work. Ultimately, this attitude hinders the planting of seeds in the garden, and nothing will grow.

This site is meant to be my version of the digital garden. The topics I’m mostly interested in are everything about Software Engineering. Yet, the beauty of a digital garden is that variety makes it even more interesting. So expect lots of other topics here, too.

This is only the beginning… Enjoy, and thank you for dropping by!

Best wishes,

commana