Hello World: Why Build This?

For years my personal website has been a simple landing page — a pointer to my activity elsewhere. That’s been (more or less) fine for a long while. So what’s changed?

A few things have led me here:

1. Keeping my technical skills sharp. I lead marketing technology and digital platforms at a large nonprofit, which means I spend most of my time on decisions and managing teams, not on code. A project like this — limited-scope, personal, low-stakes — is a way to stay fluent and keep learning without pretending I’m a full-time developer.

2. Testing in a safe space. Stakes are high for experiments at an organization with ambitious revenue goals and aggressive timelines. I used to have more space for learning around pilot or hobby projects, but those opportunities are limited now. Building in a public sandbox gives me a space to try things and document results before committing resources on the job. I’m not planning to chase every new framework or library. Just enough to stay current when making technology decisions for my organization.

3. Creating shareable artifacts. At conferences and in conversations with colleagues, I often find myself wanting to point to something I’ve worked through — a decision framework, an experiment, a lesson from applying technology in a mission-driven context. Right now, most of that exists across internal documents or in my mind. I rarely have time to think about external presentations. This blog is my effort to give it a durable, accessible home.

4. Breadcrumbs for myself. More than anything, this is a record of experiments and learning. If those breadcrumbs help someone else, even better. But the primary audience is future me — trying to remember why I made a particular choice, what I tried, and what I learned.

Why not just use a platform?

Substack, Medium, Ghost — they all solve the publishing problem well enough. And if publishing were the point, I’d probably use one of them. But the build itself is part of the learning. So is maintaining it, extending it, and living with the choices I make along the way.

There’s also something about ownership. Platforms are convenient until they aren’t — until the algorithm changes, the business model shifts, or the feature you depend on gets deprecated. A site I build and deploy myself is mine in a way that a platform account never quite is.

Isn’t this overkill?

Yes, most certainly. I’ll make some choices for this site that are far beyond what is necessary for a hobby project, but they serve my goals for testing and learning. Maybe I’m evaluating a solution for bso.org and its millions of monthly visitors. Maybe I’m already using it there and just want to keep up my fluency. Either way, the exploration has a purpose beyond this site.

What I’m committing to

I’m committing to writing regularly about the things I care about and focus on in my day-to-day: technology and systems, creative practice, and the work of leading (and growing) mission-driven organizations. I’m not going to limit myself to any one of those, but that’s the spark to get this project started.

I’m committing to building in public — showing the process, not just the polished result. The first series will document the construction of this site itself: the tools, the decisions, the trade-offs, and the mistakes. There will definitely be mistakes.

And I’m committing to learning without an artificial filter. Not as an expert dispensing advice, but as a curious, experienced practitioner working through real questions in real time.