There’s something quietly embarrassing about being a technologist with no web presence.
For years I spent my days building infrastructure for other organizations — systems that handled real traffic, real data, real consequences. Meanwhile, if you searched my name, you’d find almost nothing. A LinkedIn profile I’d half-heartedly updated. A GitHub with a few public repos. Nothing that told the full story of what I actually do or where I’m headed.
I told myself I’d get to it eventually. I never did.
The Push to Change It
Coming back to New York at the start of the year gave me a lot of time to think. I was home, I had a clear sense of what I wanted to work on, and I kept running into the same problem: when I told people what I did, I had nothing to point them to. No portfolio. No place to read more. Just me talking and hoping they took my word for it.
That’s a bad position to be in when you’re trying to go independent.
Going out on your own changes everything about how you present yourself. When you’re employed somewhere, the company’s reputation does a lot of the work. When you’re on your own, you are the brand. Your website, your writing, your work — that’s what people see before they ever talk to you. I knew I needed to take that seriously.
Building It the Right Way
I decided early on that I wasn’t going to use a template or a drag-and-drop builder. Not because there’s anything wrong with those tools — I’m actually building sites with them for clients — but because I wanted something that reflected exactly how I think about building for the web.
I built this site with Astro. Fast, static, no unnecessary JavaScript. I wrote the design system from scratch: the type scale, the spacing, the color palette. Every decision intentional. It’s the kind of site I’d build for a client who wanted something that would hold up for years without becoming a maintenance burden.
The process also reminded me how much I enjoy this work. Infrastructure and DevOps can get abstract fast. There’s something satisfying about building something visual, something you can hand someone a URL for and watch them actually use.
What Going Independent Actually Means
I’ve been freelancing formally for about a month now, and the shift in mindset is real. There’s no team to defer to, no manager to escalate things to. Every decision — how to price, who to take on, how to spend the afternoon — is yours.
That’s equal parts liberating and uncomfortable. I’m okay with that. I spent years in high-stakes on-call rotations where the right answer wasn’t always clear. Figuring things out under uncertainty is something I’ve had a lot of practice with.
What I do know is that I’m building something I believe in, for people and places I care about. The website is part of that. It’s not just a portfolio — it’s a commitment. A public statement that I’m here, I’m serious, and I’m ready to work.
If you’ve been thinking about doing the same — going independent, rebuilding your own presence, putting your work out in the world — I’d say just start. Build the thing. Put it online. You can always improve it later. The version of it that exists is always better than the perfect one that doesn’t.