Apr 6, 2024
How do I encapsulate myself in a piece of software?
I’ve been searching for the answer to that question ever since I started working on this site a few years ago. Back then, I was a young bootcamp grad hoping to jumpstart my developer portfolio, and a personal website felt like the natural first project to undertake. It offered both the technical challenge of designing, developing, and deploying a product on my own for the first time, and the opportunity to build something self-expressive and unique for myself.
That first go-around, I thought I had the existential component of the project all figured out. I wanted the site’s narrative to reflect the ambitious long-term career vision I had for myself. Because of my business education and strong soft skills, I believed I was positioned to become a well-rounded technologist — not just a respected engineer, but a product mind, designer, and essayist as well. My goal was to fill this site with essays and additional personal projects to manifest that vision into reality.
I failed to realize then that building the website in the image of my future self wouldn’t help get the job done in the present. Instead, I needed a professional identity I could rely on: foundational skills, knowledge and passions that could organically direct the project’s theme and content. There was a big gulf between the things I envisioned myself showing off here — an essay about tech product strategy, or an AI-powered music recommendation tool — and the things I could realistically accomplish. Rather than embracing my technical limitations and room for growth with manageable sub-projects, I was swinging for the fences in an attempt to portray an image of excellence. Over time, that self-imposed pressure zapped my motivation to finish this project.
Ironically, tabling this site for a few years was the perfect way to gain the perspective necessary to finish it. That hiatus helped me spend time building a true identity as a technologist. I figured out my strengths, developed technical skills and interests, and thought deeply about the places I want my career to go. With all that growth, my prior goals seem a bit more realistic and tangible today — and I realize how valuable it’d be to have a digital home base where I can share the things I am and aspire to become.
My inspiration for completing this project now, and the way to build it in my own image, is to frame it as a vehicle for continual personal development and identity-building. Above all else, I want this to be a place where I can think, write, build, and refine my work in public, rather than in a single-player software application. I want it to be a place where I can take risks and experiment with the things I create, and I want it to be a log of my interests and talents, for both inspiration and retrospection. Treating this site as a living document representative of who I am and what I’ve been — and not as a deliberate personal sales pitch — is how I’ll properly encapsulate myself in it, and how I’ll get to the places I want to go. 〽️