Hi.
Welcome to my home on the internet. I’m glad you’re here. 👋
Why a personal site, in 2026. #
I have two motivations: first to share my photography . I am an avid photographer and I am trying to deepen my practice by curating and sharing more of my work.
Second, I want to share the process of what I do at Civilytics. Specifically here I want some space to dive into the process and philosophy behind my work: open source, trust building, independent. This is a place to forge my ideas and practice my writing. So apologies in advance when the prose is rough. This is an area of active improvement!
What can I find here? #
Everything is grouped by the type of content.
The plan is to publish here and syndicate everywhere. The original is always here, with a permalink, its date, and any later corrections attached to it.
Why is it like that? #
My last post on my previous version of this website was October of 2019. After that, I mostly posted over at Civilytics, and on my Substack, and on LinkedIn and on Twitter. And as time went on I came to see these platforms (except for Civilytics of course) simply get worse - worse for sharing, worse for reading, and worse for interacting. It wasn’t the people or the content that got worse - it was the platform. And all that content I put on those platforms is gone. At best it’s hidden, and at worst, gone.
I wanted something that felt more like me and that could serve as an official public listing of what I want to share. The truth is, we have to take the internet back from the platforms and make it work for us. This is my step toward that.
So instead of moving platforms and trying to migrate content, I wanted a place I control. But the right tools for that didn’t seem to exist. So instead of sharing my photos or my thoughts online - I just stopped. But now, I have a good idea of a durable long-term way I want to be present on the web.
This is a personal site. It runs on infrastructure I control — a static site generator, a git repository, a CDN — and everything published here lives at a URL I own. Posts, photographs, links, datasets: all of it originates here first and travels outward from there. You can follow along other places, but if I want to move my content somewhere else, I can just point my RSS feeds to whatever platform comes next. And the best version of anything I write or photograph can always be found here.
This is part of an idea called the IndieWeb and the case for it keeps getting easier to make. Owning your own corner of the web means your archive doesn’t depend on a company’s product roadmap. It means you can find my work without an account, without an algorithm choosing for you, and without surrendering your attention to whatever else is on the page; so no Nazi content or offensive advertisements.
Inspiration #
I first thought this could be possible in late 2025 when I stumbled across Justin Searsls’ site . The simplicity and elegance of the site and how it functioned spoke to the avid self-hoster in me. And when I needed an LLM subscription for work, I started working with AI assistance to build something similar. That’s where you are today. For more on how I built the website, including my policies for using AI, see the colophon .
More broadly, this site owes its shape to the IndieWeb community and its POSSE principle — Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. That’s exactly how everything here works: each post, photograph, link, and dataset is published here first and then travels outward to the other platforms where you might find me.
Follow along. #
There’s no newsletter to subscribe to and no account to make. Just feeds - you’ll find them on the footer of every page. And if you only want some of the content, you can use per-tag feeds for anything with a #tag — append /feed.xml to any tag page.
