I don't know why this comes as such a surprise, but this process of building this blog from the ground up has been so energizing for me and if I reflect on it and I think this is a couple of different reasons.

One is I've had this feeling like deep down that I like I couldn't figure out why I couldn't write like I used to. And I just figured, you know, there was something in like, I just couldn't sit down to kind of do it. But the truth is, is that the more that writing to me for the public or like just putting it out there has meant putting it through some kind of social media or even substack.

It's just sort of changed it for me. Because writing on a blog that like literally like maybe five people see, isn't really writing for public. It's writing for myself first, but having a place to put it. And that all just changed in the era of social media, where it just felt like, you know, every single time I would write, I would be like, oh, what if someone judges it? Or what if like it isn't good enough, or they take it the wrong way? And that's just not the way to sit down and write or it's not the way that I sit down and write. And so it just changed the whole process. and try as I might, I couldn't get to a place where I could just write as freely as I have before. And so now where I've built this thing, again, where there's no likes or there's no like, you know, traffic coming to it or any of that kind of stuff.

I've built my own forest where there might not be anyone else that, you know, sees it, but it's fine because it's for me.

And then the other part is I built it from the ground up, on the internets. And that means, you know, even though for the last 10 years, I've gotten more, quote unquote, technical from like a software standpoint. I've learned how to code all of that stuff, but there's still a part of me that feels inadequate. That feels like, man, I wish I had learned how to code properly, that I could build the things that I see in my head. And now with what we've got with the level of like AI code editors and all of these different tools that are just getting better and better, I can because I know enough about like how to write code. I just don't know enough to be able to do it all from scratch all by myself. In the time that I have, by the way, that that's really important.

But now I can because, you know, in an hour here and an hour there with Cursor and Claude Code, I've got everything that I need. And I've been able to build it. So I haven't had to pass my vision through someone else and trying to figure out like how to justify it or how to make it super efficient because I'm being very precise on this font or that spacing. I can do whatever the heck I want.

And that feels so empowering. It's just a simple, personal website, but man, I wish every single person could create their own personal website. And they can.

So maybe my wish is, I hope that everyone does create their own personal website from scratch with the colors and the fonts and the weirdness that they would put on their voice notes or pictures or, I don't know, poems or whatever else it is, I wish for us to all have our little weird corners of the Internet again, taken back for ourselves that is not controlled by anyone, that is not meant to do anything else, but just be. And so, yeah, I've just got all these little zings of energy because finally I've been able to build this little place for me by me, the way that I want it.

And I just, there's just been so much power in that.