I decided to build myself a professional website because as a consultant, visibility and accessibility are essential. Potential clients want to see what I can do. They want to know what projects I've worked on and how I think about technical challenges.
Why now? 🤔
I've always been a consultant who focuses on client project content - from RAG systems to geospatial data processing. In a typical project, I focus on technical matters. And now I realized that my skills have grown continuously but my visibility hasn't. So now I want to:
- Share my expertise - technical articles and case studies
- Build trust - transparent expertise
- Be discoverable - SEO and professional networks
Changes in web development
While building this website, I had a flashback to decades ago and realized how dramatically tools have evolved. The last time I maintained a personal website was in the early 2000s. Back then, it was completely normal to write HTML by hand, create layouts with tables in a text editor, and update every single page when you wanted changes to navigation or sidebars. Sure, there was CSS, Apache directives, and PHP back then, but maintaining and serving pages was quite clunky.
Now, twenty years later, the tools have completely changed:
Static site generators
I'm a Python guy, so I chose Pelican as my site generator. Pelican and similar tools have revolutionized creating simple websites. They provide a ready-made foundation from which you can develop your site. Content is conveniently written in Markdown and the tool generates the HTML to be served on the web. The result is a fast and secure static site.
Git and automated deployment
Publishing is simple: I push updates to GitHub and from there Cloudflare Pages builds and publishes my site automatically. No FTP, no manual uploads. Version control and publishing are part of the same workflow. I love version control, by the way. 😍
Free hosting
Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, GitHub Pages - static site hosting is free and scales globally through CDN. Load times are milliseconds anywhere in the world.
Next steps
My intention is to regularly publish my thoughts (only the publishable ones), technical articles and observations, and case studies from my projects. Thanks for visiting and for your interest! ✨