How it started?

This is the short story why I created this website you are currently using. I will also introduce you to the future of this site and spoiler some content that will be created as part of this journey.

First of all why ON THE FCKNG EARTH do I write in English?

To make it short, AUDIENCE. The audience is much greater if I write in English than in German. Obvisouly I could just let <insert absolutely most creative LLM of your choice> write my content or at least translate it. BUT, I’m here to learn stuff. I want to extend my vocabulary and get more fluent in English. I assumed if I write regularely, I MUST get better at some point. Maybe I will read this post in on year and realize, I did not earn one skill point. But at least I tried.

Furthermore most documentation of code and tech in general is found in English. So I want to be part of this community.

What happend that motivated me to create a personal website?

Obvisouly there is not only one reason why I decided to create a personal website. I will write about multiple aspects that lead to the decision to start building it.

Psychological Reason

All started with a really dark period in my life. I lost all motivation. I was trying to keep the illusion up of being flawless. I was trying to keep up with technology. Getting better at everything. Trying to solve problems of other people instead of mine. I had to cover up all my shortcomings. I invested my whole day and all my energy into seeking recognition. I couldn’t ask for help. Everything pulled me into a downward spiral. I havent slept for days, missed meals regularely for weeks, skipped my workouts (and even worse; worked out in an unhealthy and painful way), did not talk to any friends, developed panic attacks and finally I broke.

A long unhealthy period ended with my breakdown. I couldn’t cope anymore. I was feeling empty. I was finally ready to ask for help. And I got the help I required. I’m still work in progress. But I’m on a good path. I want to fight my perfectionism. This is why I want to share my projects online. To ask for feedback. I need to learn mistakes are okay. I need to learn that I can change direction at any time, if I realize I’m on the wrong path. I need to learn nothing will ever be perfect.

Motivational Reason

One reason why perfectionism killed me, was my personal goals got higher and harder to reach. My self-esteem got lower every day and my goals were opposing the drop in my self esteem. Therefore I needed to work harder every day to componsate.

I want to change this thinking. We need to break down large projects into smaller ones. Working in an agile manner. Celebrate the accomplishment of reaching milestones to keep the motivation up. Asking users and customers for feedback to define the route for a better project. Only if I see any progress, I will stay committed.

Overcomplicated or overplanned projects will only make it harder to start at the beginning. The enormous pile of required work gets too large. So I can’t see a path to climb it. I get overwhelmed and the project dies in the planning phase.

So I break down projects into bloggable content. Each change should be graspable in one blog post. Then it stays small and I can handle it.

Community Reason

I’m in love with the open source community. Even if I haven’t committed much in the past. Thinking about people all over the world working together FOR FREE to accomplish something greater, heals my broken heart.

Most cooperations are only possible because of open source software. But only a small part of them is ready to give something back. This is really sad. I want to be part of a better world. I’m against the capitalist model that prioritizes profit over the people and the planet.

I want to connect with people that contribute to free and open code. I want to work together with people that invest time, energy and knowledge into a project without getting max profit of it. It is okay to earn money but it always depends.

Career and Resumee Reason

I like the idea of working on my projects and sharing about them to keep my résumé up to date automatically. Head hunters and HR departments should get a good overview about my motivation and my skillset by visiting my website. Or maybe future customers of my own company will be able to see first-hand how I work. I want to create transparency.

What are THE topics I will write about?

Now that you know enough about my history, motivation and core ideas; what will I write about in the future? I love to learn new stuff. I love to CREATE and BUILD. In the past I wasn’t able to do that because of my personal problems. But now I want to change that.

I will write about the journey of my website.

  • Having almost no experience with frontend to building a website
  • How to get better at writing
  • How to use SEO to reach a broader audience
  • How to create a earning from a website?
  • Creating content for others to learn new these topics
  • Hosting without being depended on large US cooperations

Also all future projects will be part of my blog posts. Some ideas will be mentioned in the next section

Maybe I will also write more about more personal and non tech related topics

  • Personal Development
  • Fitness Journey
  • Book Reviews
  • Self-Employment

Do I already have some project ideas?

I have an enormous amount of ideas. I need to evaluate which I will postpone and which I want to focus now. The topics in this section should already be filtered. More projects will follow!

  • As already mentioned building my personal website (join my journey as a frontend newbie)
  • Hosting and Building in the EU (with scaleway)
  • Collecting and visualizing Metrics in different contexts (tech related with OpenTelemtry, but also personal related with running and weight lifting): As most programmers (i guess) I’m deeply in love with data
  • I want to learn GO and Distributed Systems
  • I usually work with neovim but me setup is really outdated. So maybe I will write about my setup
  • And my personal most loved topic. IoT and Data Engineering. I love the combination of collecting data and solve problems for the real world.

OOF that got longer than I expected

Remember at the beginning: “This is the short story …“? It got deeper than I imagined. I’m sorry. But as you know now, I’m a perfectionist. (YEA I’m working on it. I swear) So it took my a really long time to write an be satisfied with it. Hopefully you got a good overview about my motivation and will follow my journey into my future. Maybe you will be a part of it.

Stay curious!
~ Lukas