July 22, 2025

Why build a personal website in 2025?

Because it’s fun!

As an iOS engineer used to the lengthy process of building, uploading, and waiting for Apple’s approval to ship it feels downright magical to write something, upload it and have it available for the whole world to see in minutes, sometimes even doing all of it from my phone with the help of Textastic and Working Copy (isn’t it a bit sad that I can quickly make a website from my iPhone but not an iOS app?).

With a full-time job and a 2-year-old I don’t have as much time for side projects as I used to and the web fits in that limited availability better than a complete iOS app would while still giving me the joy of building something that’s entirely mine from scratch.

I can just go about my day, suddenly have an idea about a design change or a content update, find 30 minutes to code, try it out and ship it. This is also particularly suited to my creative process as ideas tend to come to me while doing something else. With the web those ideas don’t have to accumulate in an ever growing backlog waiting for me to have a couple of hours of free time to work on them, I can just iterate quickly and have the satisfaction of having shipped what I had just imagined of a few moments earlier.

And of course it’s just fun to learn something new and to do it by « hand ».

Because of ownership.

I think it’s more important than ever to regain ownership of your online presence. For me the process started a few years ago when after migrating from my old gmail address I moved to HEY. For a year I was very happy with it and started sharing my shiny new @hey address. Then controversy hit 37signals and when I learned more about their founders and their opinions I moved away from the service. To future proof myself I got my own domain so that I could start using @florentalexandre.be and not care what email provider was behind it. Just to avoid being affected by the next scandal. With that domain came a bit of storage and I also created a one page website.

Since then, a lot of the third party services I was using started enshittifying or worse. Twitter of course was bought by Elon so I deleted my account and moved to Mastodon and Bluesky. Instagram which used to be my favorite way to share photos transformed into a TikTok clone. I sometimes felt the need to write or share something but just didn’t have enough trust to do it on a platform I don’t own anymore.

Then I got motivated to build something of my own after reading a blog post from Louie Mantia and seeing a few beautiful personal pages in my mastodon feed.

I still don’t know exactly what this website will end up being but I’m enjoying the process and it feels important to have a little corner of the web where I can present myself in exactly the way I want to. At the very least I want it to be my official about page and a repository for sharing what I like. I also want to start writing more but we’ll see what happens after this initial post, I’m not making any promises there.

If you enjoyed reading me and are curious to see if I’ll ever post again don’t hesitate to subscribe to my RSS feed or contact me.

Florent.