Motivation

Why do you have a personal web page at all, you may ask? And what’s your reasoning behind making the repository public?

Das erste Haus baust du für deinen Feind, das zweite für deinen Freund und das dritte für dich selbst

This german saying, sometimes attributed to the famous philosopher Confucius, translates roughly into:

You will build the first house for your foe, the second for your friend and the third one for yourself

So far, I haven’t build any houses, but several websites and applications during the last years. Some of them were part of my professional work, others for friends. Some applications were toy projects for myself to get a feeling for a programming language, an emerging framework or technology. Others supported me to get some stuff done. You know, these kind of projects you expect to save you tons of work in the future, but you spend many hours until they are ready.

But until now, I never build my personal web page. And for good reason: I didn’t know what story to tell. The web hosts n dull websites nobody cares about (and n is a sufficiently large number), so there’s no point wasting time contributing n+1. That would not change the world for the better. On the other hand, there are so many professional portfolios out there promoting themselves that I cannot and do not want to compete with them. So I’ve been putting off creating a personal website until I have something substantial to share that I deeply care about, that is helpful to others, and honest about myself.

This point in time has come now, and these are the reasons:

• I would like to continue sending e-mails to my friends with the mail address @t-online.de from my own mail server with the address @thorsten-michael.de.1

• I need to apply for new jobs. This is by far the deeper reason why I have to reach out and show off some expertise and qualities.

So, I decided to create my personal website that is going to be the house for myself and telling the story about building it along the way. Therefore, this repository is open to the public to show off not only what is built, but how and the reasoning behind it. This is quite a challenge, but also an advantage for myself:

• I have to be mindful and take time in the construction process, rather than just getting something up and running.
• I have to be careful about sensitive data. The application obviously has to be designed to store secrets outside the source code. This can be accomplished by storing all application configuration in the environment, as suggested in The twelve-factor App.

Does this website change the world for the better? Probably not. Is it helpful to others? Maybe, I hope so. But for sure, this is about something substantial that I deeply care about.