Hello Internet

This is my first real personal website, it’s also a long time coming. The idea of writing, publishing my thoughts and having a personal website always appealed to me. I’m a geek, so that’s the type of things that I like.

But, as with many things in life, thoughts only take you so far. One day I would need to sit down and make it happen.

Nothing about it is particularly hard. I’ve know how to make sites for a long time, and writing is something I’ve done pretty much all my life (although not as much as I would like). But taking the committing and the time of seeing an idea through is the hardest part.

This first post is more of easy first step. “What will I write about?” - Well let’s start writing about how I don’t know what I’m gonna do. That’s gonna be easy. After that I’ll have already broken the ice, and I hope the next posts will come more easily.

Why write in the first place though? And why do it publicly?

There’s plenty of reasons to write, and different people do it for different reasons. But for me they were:

Writing to think

I’m always fascinated how things are very different when they are just an idea versus real things. Even words on a piece of paper can sound much better in our inner voice. Taking the time to write your thoughts can be a great way to think and rationalize and make progress.

Steven Sinofosky is a great advocate for that (and a great writer IMO). He’s one of the people who inspire me to write to think more clearly.

Writing is a great skill

Communication is one of the few universal human values. Everyone, everywhere is communicating. Being a good communicator is a skill that’ll help in every aspect of life: from personal, to professional, from relationships to inner peace.

I like to think of myself as a good communicator, specially when speaking or presenting. That’s an area that I invested time and effort on improving. But I want to get better, I want to become a great communicator, both for the sake of it (which I find really fun to do) and for the things and opportunities that it can bring me.

Writing, and specially long form writing, doesn’t come naturally to me. Writing here is a great way to practice it.

This is a great corner of the internet

Recently I’ve decided to explore the personal website space of the internet. I knew a few blogs, but didn’t read them regularly. I also wanted to discover more. So I when hunting.

One link led to another and I spent a good part of the last week reading personal blogs.

I’m not one to complain much about how things were better in the past and how technology is ruining everything. But recently the standard batch of social media (Instagram, Twitter and Youtube) was tiring me. It mostly ate my week nights and I could spend hours searching for something cool to see or read and find nothing.

There’s GREAT content there, specially on Youtube, but the signal to noise ratio was too hight for my taste. In that regard, Instagram was the worst offender.

I don’t mind the algorithm suggesting new content to me. But at least with Twitter and Youtube I there’s more personal agency over that. On Ig I just felt that for 1 post I wanted to see there were 10 random that I just lost track of it all.

Blogs and personal websites are the opposite of it all. They are much more experimental, candid and less “plastic”. Also there has seem to be a cultura and a community around it that I wanted to be a part of.

About the website

This is a playground for me. I decided to create it “all myself” using Sveltekit as a static site generator and Tailwind for styling, not templates. That gives me the chance of building something unique. It’s not gonna be the best of the most beautiful site out there, but that was never the point.

The goal here is to try things out, write whatever comes to mind, change the layout and the visuals to see what sticks, without worrying that I’ll break anything important.

It was also intentional not to call this a blog, but a personal website, as I hope to experiment with other types of content and pages here.

I also been very much drawn to the idea of digital gardens after reading Maggie Appleton essay on the subject

I don’t know what I’ll end up writing here, how long or how short it will be or the subjects. My goal is to different things, and do what my heart says at the moment.

Why write in english

I’m Brazilian, I live in Rio de Janeiro, born and raised. So the decision to write in English was not an obvious one. My mother tongue is Portuguese. I’m also fluent in English, but I’m much not as comfortable with it and I make much more mistakes, specially when it comes to spelling.

There’s also the argument of favoring my country’s culture, and its language. But the more I thought about it, more the right decision came clearer to me.

The fact that I’m not as comfortable in English is a great reason to practice it more, so that’s was the first factor. But the major one was the people that I would be able to connect.

The main idea for this website is to get into the personal web community, meet and talk to new people along the way. By writing in English I open myself to an international community. It’s not about having a big following (I don’t this site will ever get a thousand visits in a month) but being able to share my experiences with people all around the globe. That’s what I’m most excited about.

So that’s it, much longer than I intended to write and probably very confusing and uninteresting to anyone reading but a first step. I don’t know to where but I’m curious to find out.

LG ✌️