I finally have a personal website. 🎉 For my first post, I thought I’d share the backstory.

So why a website?

Either it’s a mid-life crisis or I needed a new hobby. It’s cheaper than owning a car in Singapore, so I’m calling it a win. It started when I began writing about tech and posting on LinkedIn.

Down the rabbit hole

While preparing my next post (teaser: it’s AI-related), I needed to do some research and testing.

Problem: I had no lab. I could run Virtual Machines on my home PC, but let’s just say it’s not ideal.

Then I discovered home labs. Don’t worry, there will be interesting topics coming out of this. That led to another rabbit hole: a refurbished enterprise mini-PC, bare metal, then VMs and LXC containers. And, of course, the inevitable thought: if I’m running a server at home anyway, why not host my website on it too?

Plot twist: My internet connection had other plans

Before committing to hosting the website at home, I set up Healthchecks.io to monitor my home labs’ connectivity. Week one: multiple “down” alerts. Ouch. Back to the drawing board. The last two weeks have been quiet, though. No alerts. Perhaps it knows I’m watching.

The new plan

I like a challenge, so I took the opportunity to try something new:

• CI/CD — Automating the process of building and deploying a website.
• Static sites — Understanding how to deliver a fast, simple website without needing a traditional server to generate every page.
• Serverless architecture — Learning how cloud services can handle parts of an application without me managing the underlying servers.
• Full-stack serverless applications — Eventually going beyond a simple website and experimenting with applications that have both front-end and back-end components.

Quite a lot to learn from what started as “I should get a website.”

The almost 100% free-tier challenge

Another goal is to build and run as much as possible using free-tier services. Well, almost 100%. The domain registration doesn’t count. The internet isn’t completely free, unfortunately. 😄 I’m more than happy to pay for premium services when there’s a genuine need. For now, I’d like to see how far the free options can take me while I learn.

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So, that’s the story behind this website.

What started as a way to share my tech posts has turned into a home lab project, a cloud learning exercise, and probably a few more rabbit holes waiting to happen.

Let’s see where this journey takes me.