12th anniversary of hamatti.org

There’s an old trope that when a software developer writes a new blog post, they first rewrite their whole website from scratch. It’s not completely untrue either: some people blog so rarely that when they decide to get back into blogging, they want to remake their site, then publish that one post and never get back to blogging. I’ve definitely been guilty of that in my early days of blogging.

The early days

This month marks the 12th anniversary of my domain name, hamatti.org that I purchased a few years into my university studies. It wasn’t my first domain or website but it was different from the previous ones in that I had very clear intentions to build this into a portfolio / home in the web for my professional journeys in software development.

As a computer science and statistics student, I wanted to start thinking about the career I’d move into and have a URL I could pop into my business cards or share with people as I discussed career stuff with them.

The first few iterations of the website were very much portfolio focused. I showcased some of my best hobby projects and while those sites have disappeared into the void of time, I still remember them with good memories.

Over the years, I’ve picked up many different layouts from HTML5 UP! and built many versions on this domain. My current site is also based on their Editorial layout that I have later modified and rewritten that modified version from scratch.

Current site

One thing I’m especially proud of is that the current version is about 6 years old already. When I started working at Futurice and became friends with Fotis, he inspired me to build a new website with Eleventy and I’ve been on that journey ever since. Half of my domain’s lifetime has been on the same site, that’s really exciting.

And with this site I finally really picked up the habit of blogging. As I wrote in Short history of my blogging journey few months back, I’ve started so many blogs and written a few posts only to abandon them later and starting a new blog when I had something I wanted to share.

This blog is now home to over 400 blog posts (some that I’ve rescued from those abandoned old blogs), quarter of which have been written this year alone. I’ve always loved writing but seeing that number now amazes and even surprises me.

I talked about the origins of the domain name last year in What's in the name? The story behind my domain. In a nutshell, “hamatti” is a nickname, derived from my full name of Juha-Matti, that I was given in 8th grade and it stuck with me and I’ve been using the nickname hamatti in all sorts of forums and platforms ever since.

Following the inspiration from Alex Chan, I set up a repository with a GitHub Action to take a screenshot of my site once a month so that I can capture each iteration of the site in case another 12 years from now, the old code has disappeared and I want to remember what my site used to look like.

The future

I’ve been toying around the idea of doing a complete redesign sometime in near future to freshen things up a bit. I just like the current site a bit too much and don’t consider myself very talented when it comes to web design.

One good thing I have going for me is that since this site is built with Eleventy, I don’t have to worry about the fact that I have quite a lot of content here. Since everything is generated from source materials, I can change the layout and styling by only touching a few HTML templates and CSS files and all the contents of the site will follow.

One thing’s for sure: I ain’t giving up this domain now. I plan to keep it with me for years to come.