Why?

Post #0 published on by Tobias Fedder

Welcome to my zeroth post where I share my motivation for creating this website. The kind of palaver full of useless details about me the author, drenched in the kind of self‐importance, which you can find everywhere on the web. That stuff that I dislike usually, because I am a rational person, meaning I like to delude myself into thinking I would act based on facts and reason.
I don’t care for someone’s story, tell me the facts, the steps to take, or the idea behind something; that kind of sentiment. If you found this blog looking for some technical stuff, then feel free to skip this post, I understand. It’s the zeroth post anyway, it doesn’t even count. That’s because I wrote the next one first, making it the true first blog post. Yet, because motivation precedes action, this post —⁠ ⁠the one you’re reading right now⁠ ⁠— should come before the other one, before the first. Yeah, anyway.

As you may have already inferred from the previous paragraph, my communication skills are a very mixed bag. Nonetheless, over time, I learned that there is a reason for stories being everywhere. That’s because they are the most effective form of human to human communication our species has come up with so far. Also, noticed that I wrote that I dislike these kinds of posts usually? Time and time again, I find myself liking someone’s blog article, social media post, or some other work of theirs; and then another one, and another one, so they grow on me. I start to wonder: How do they come up with all this? What makes them tick? Where did they get their perspective from? What are their stories?
So, just in case anyone is asking: Why this website?

I fell in love with the web in 2011, during my purely classroom‐based vocational training (except for a six‐week internship) to become a technical assistant for informatics. Among all the things we —⁠ ⁠young people who couldn’t land a real, paid apprenticeship⁠ ⁠— were taught, to prepare us for working in first‐level tech support, these four made a brief appearance: HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. Until then I was there for the same reason the employment office recommended it to me, to not add to the youth unemployment statistics. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do for a living. Did we learn how to use layout tables for the UI of our very basic CRUD app? Sure. It didn’t matter, I was hooked.

Having a goal, all of a sudden, led to even more turns on my educational pathway. I qualified eventually for higher education, I applied to an organization that offered a dual study apprenticeship, and I was lucky to join their web team halfway through.

Since then I work as a web dev. I am still passionate about the web platform. For that reason I’ve been thinking for quite some time that I should run my own website. But what should that website be about? I had to pick a domain, but the domains I was interested in were already taken. As with all things in life there wasn’t a perfect match, so I left it at daydreaming about having a website.

A push was what I needed, that push was the decision to get married. When we started planning the party and were looking for a location in 2019, I could envision myself answering the same simple questions over and over again, via text, phone or in person, possibly even twice to the same invitee. If only there was some way to provide information to many people from one source; a source I could update at any time, making new information available to everyone. I had a solution in mind.

There was a real purpose and a deadline. Finally good enough was actually good enough, so I picked this domain in a package with email services. Next step was choosing the cheapest VPS, installing Apache httpd on it and creating some HTML files and a stylesheet. It was fun and also a bit of a challenge, to make a webpage look consistent with the style of the invitation cards, which were chosen without any consideration for a fitting, similar looking website.

I think the page fulfilled its purpose. Next to some tounge‐in‐cheek romantic babble I placed the FAQ. I anticipated some questions upfront, but also felt the need to add some after being asked twice or thrice. Everyone could see

  • what to expect in terms of food, activities, etc.
  • the dress code: comfortable
  • the time and date, as well as the location of our party in 2020
  • the assumed date for 2021, after we had to call off the party in 2020, because there was a pandemic or something
  • the time, date and location for 2022, because it also couldn’t be done in 2021, for some reason

Although the pandemic wasn’t over, in the summer of 2022 we finally managed to celebrate —⁠ ⁠our two year anniversary⁠ ⁠— with friends and family. Which is great, but…
Since then my website, consisting of four pages, has been staring at me. One page, the one page that had a purpose, had fulfilled its purpose. Another two pages, namely legal notice and privacy notice, only existed because of laws and regulations. Lastly, there was a homepage, an index.html, because it felt weird to me to serve the page regarding our wedding celebration on root.

The homepage was made up of the headline WIP, followed by a quote from a song, that is loosely related to something being in progress, finished off with an animated SVG. The last one of those three parts being the only fun bit on what was otherwise the modern day equivalent of the early 2000s forever under construction homepages. Those with a construction site GIF blinking in your face, hurting your eyes.

That non‐website, still staring at me while I’m writing this on localhost, feels worse than having no website at all —⁠ ⁠something has to be done.
Luckily, having followed the web closely for many years and working as a web dev, therefore learning new stuff every day, I now believe that I am in a position to also share the knowledge and ideas I’ve gathered over the years. That I no longer just form my own opinions regarding the web, but that some of them might be substantive enough to put them out there for others to see and discuss. To do that in a free, flexible and worthy format, I can’t rely on any social media corporation.

So that’s why. I want my own website to feel good about myself. I want a blog to express ideas and thoughts regarding one of my passions: the web. I will start this website over with a blog. Trying to get it out there as soon (as minimal) as possible. Beginning with blogging about building this blog. And if you find anything of it useful: even better.

Have fun.

Tobi