Hello, world

Every developer eventually builds a personal site. This one is mine, and it has a slightly embarrassing origin story.

It started with a certificate

One of my colleagues ran a workshop about web security. Somewhere between the theory and the demos, he pulled up the certificate for his own website: his own domain, his own little corner of the internet, with a padlock to prove it.

I was impressed. And, if I’m honest, a bit jealous. I wanted one too. :D

So here we are. Fittingly, .dev domains only work over HTTPS, so this site couldn’t exist without a certificate of its own.

It didn’t come out of nowhere

Over the last couple of months I’d been playing with Cloudflare quite a lot already.

The first project was our wedding website, michaelandulaaregettingmarried.uk: RSVPs, travel details, the dress code, all the things guests kept asking about. You might notice this site borrows a fair bit of its look.

The second is a book club website I’m helping my cousin build, her very own space for her group. That one is still in progress.

Both were for other people, though. This time I wanted something that was just mine.

A diary, mostly

What I like most about having my own website is that it can be a kind of diary. What I did, where I went, what I learned along the way.

So expect a bit of everything:

• Trips and travel notes
• Climbing and hiking days, the good and the soggy
• Games I’ve been playing, mostly on my Xbox
• The occasional dev project

Not everything will be public

Some posts will be just for me. Diaries are like that.

That gives me the perfect excuse to make this my experimental site for learning more about security: logging in with OAuth2, keeping private pages private, and whatever rabbit hole that leads to next. I’ll write about that too, at least the parts that are safe to share.

Thanks for stopping by.