I’ve been slowly revamping this site in the gaps between bigger projects. Think of it as a palate cleanser.
It’s one of my favorite phrases lately, borrowed from a brilliant engineer I once worked with. Traditionally, a palate cleanser is something you eat or drink to reset your taste buds before the next course. In work terms, it’s what brings you back to sanity after long, draining stretches. Something light enough to rebuild momentum, yet meaningful enough to restore energy.
What I realized, somewhat late, was that I desperately needed a creative outlet.
So I stopped coding.
Instead, I opened Figma. Then Dribbble. I wandered through designs, color palettes, typefaces, and layouts until inspiration finally kicked in. What you see here is the result of that detour. I experimented until things felt clean, modern, and just different enough. Huge credit to @zadvorsky and OpenPeeps for the simulation concept on the homepage and the solid visual foundation it’s built on.
That was my palate cleanser. For a few hours, I wasn’t an engineer shipping code. I was a designer trying to make something beautiful.
If you know me, you know it didn’t stop there. I kept tweaking things over the following weeks until the design felt pixel perfect, at least to me. The next step was bringing it to life. I made a short list of technologies I genuinely wanted to work with.
Golang was an easy starting point. Server-side rendered pages. No modern framework. Modern CSS, canvas, and just a little vanilla JavaScript. I’ll admit, I missed Tailwind the entire time. Writing CSS by hand was interesting. But it was also a great reminder of how easy it is to forget fundamentals, and how much you relearn when you’re back in flexbox and grid land without abstractions.
The backend is a CMS, my favorite one, PocketBase. Written in Go. Clean, fast, and beautifully designed, both aesthetically and functionally. If you haven’t checked it out, you should.
Over the weekends, I hand crafted this site phase by phase. Each step felt like learning, questioning intent, sharpening skills, and deciding what this site should be and, just as importantly, what it shouldn’t.
What I landed on was simple. Every section should be purposeful and creative.
I have random thoughts, some inspirational, some clever, some just amusing. The About page captures that, with an illustration of me doing what I do best, pondering.
I also love those online threads like “What apps are you using?”, “Best X app of 2026”, and “Share your dock.” It’s fascinating to see how people work and how different their setups are from mine. That curiosity turned into the Cool page, a simple list of tools and things I genuinely use and like. No referrals. No affiliations. Just a snapshot of my tastes.
Lastly, this is a place for deeper thoughts. Yes, blog posts, but informal ones. I’ll be upfront, I’m mostly writing this for myself. For reflection. For clarity. But I hope you enjoy it too and maybe even find something useful along the way.
Thanks for reading.