I finally did it—a project I’ve had at the back of my mind for God knows how long. After a couple of sleepless nights researching and trying out various tools and platforms, I’m glad to finally see this website come back to life. It’s been a long time coming, and hopefully this is the final version—the one where all my thoughts, opinions, deep dives, and everything in between will live on for as long as I’m around (or whenever the world ends, whichever comes first). But before we talk more about what I want this space to be, let’s take a trip back through time.
V1.0 (2011-2016)
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of having a little corner of the internet I could call my own. I remember the day I bought this domain name like it was yesterday. Debit cards didn’t always work online back then. Sometime in 2011, my bank sent an email telling me I could get a new Visa card that could be used to buy things online. I immediately got one and thought to myself: what could I possibly buy? A domain name! Every tech personality I idolized had one. I should get one too! And I did. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but my face just lit up when I got the confirmation email from GoDaddy, and I used my newly acquired coding skills to build my first website.
My blog during the V1.0 era, showing the variety of tech content I was writing in 2014
Twitter was just in its infancy in those days—having launched in March 2006—and many people didn’t really understand what it was. I had joined in 2010, and as more people were signing up, I’d get questions about how it works. I got tired of repeating myself over and over, so naturally, I wrote an article titled “How to Explain Twitter to Those Who Just Don’t Get It.” Twitter back then was so small that we all knew each other by username. I wrote that article for myself primarily, so that instead of having to repeat myself, I could just share a link to the post instead. What I didn’t anticipate was other Twitter users sharing it with their friends who didn’t get it. So it was just a matter of time before I was known as “the guy who explained how Twitter works”—makes me laugh whenever I think about that label, but it was such an interesting moment. I got to realize just how powerful writing your thoughts can be and recognize how powerful the internet was: no matter how small you are, your ideas can live on forever. The internet does not forget. The fact that I can still pull up an archive of a post I wrote 13 years ago from archive.org is all the proof you need if you had any doubts.
V2.0 (2016-2024)
By 2015, I had become an avid Twitter user. The majority of the social networks we have come to love (or hate) were built around that era. Social media was the new kid on the block, and every other week, a new company was popping up with some interesting twist. I tried many of them, but Twitter and Instagram were where you’d find me most of the time. When Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, announced he was starting a new company to give writers a tool that would help amplify their voices, I got excited. Medium became the home of my blog as soon as it launched.
My Medium profile during the V2.0 era, showing my software engineering focused content
By this time, I had built quite a following on Twitter. I mostly tweeted about things I was working on in tech, was heavily focused on mentoring aspiring engineers, and was running an e-commerce startup. And if you were a Twitter user, Medium was a great fit. They allowed you to sign up with your Twitter account and made it easy for your Twitter followers to find your publications. It made sense to me, especially when Twitter still had the 140-character limit on tweets and no support for threads. So I used Medium to write things that couldn’t fit in 140 characters. What this version of my site was known for was a tutorial series called #ReactForNewbies (which I eventually deleted because of how quickly it became irrelevant and outdated) and a personal story about why I became a software engineer.
This era was interesting. I went from practically living half my days on social networks to slowly withdrawing from them. From picking up my phone and checking what was trending on Twitter before brushing my teeth to completely deleting all my social media accounts. More on that in another essay coming soon.
We got to see just how powerful social media companies can be—how they optimize everything they show you to keep you hooked, how attention became a currency, how our personal data can be mined aggressively for financial gain, and more importantly, how dangerous centralized power can be. The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed us how 87 million Facebook profiles were harvested without consent to influence political campaigns, while YouTube’s algorithms were found to promote conspiracy theories to maximize watch time, often leading users down dangerous rabbit holes of misinformation.
I vividly remember the day I found out that when you purchase a digital copy of a book, movie, or music album, you don’t actually own it—you just have a license to access it as long as you’re alive. You can’t pass it down to your children or give it away like a physical item. And even if you’re okay with it because the company you patronize is doing right by their customers, it never clicks that companies are run by people. And people come and go. From Twitter to X. From @jack to @elonmusk. $44 billion #LetThatSinkIn
V3.0 (2025-Present)
If there’s one thing I learned in the V2.0 era that I’m grateful for, it’s the power of decentralization—putting power back in the hands of the masses, where nobody as a single entity can be trusted, but everything as a collective can be verified. Ironically, this is how the internet was in the very early days.
Before we handed our digital lives to tech giants, people ran email servers in their basements. Websites lived on computers you could touch. Data belonged to the people who created it. The internet was a network of networks, not a handful of walled gardens. We built standards—POP, IMAP, FTP, HTTP—that let anyone participate without asking permission. Then we traded that freedom for convenience, and convenience for control we never really had.
I want to go back to the internet I grew up with (without the dialup modems of course). The one where freedom wasn’t an illusion. The one where I could build my digital home without worrying about it being taken away.
I knew I wanted to be in full control of everything I own. Ambitious, I know, but I wanted to start small. Getting off social media was just the beginning. This website is the next step—a space that is mine, where all the data is one click away, where I can move it wherever I want, whenever I want, without worrying about losing anything. The benefits of decentralization are clear: no single point of failure, enhanced security and privacy, and most importantly, putting control back in the hands of users rather than centralized entities.
So what can you expect from this space? Well, some things haven’t changed. Every essay I write will be a response to a question I’m asked frequently. Instead of repeating the same answer over and over, I’ll have an essay to reference. And if I change my mind, I can update that essay with my new ideas.
A lot of people know me as a software engineer, but over the last few years I’ve developed other interests that I speak very passionately about and would like to share here as well. Since I published my last article, I became a girl dad, relocated to another country right at the start of the pandemic, transitioned into a new role in big tech, rediscovered my love for playing piano, developed a passion for interior design, and finally took my fitness journey seriously. I want to write about all these things and more. I want to share my thoughts on the things that matter to me, the things that inspire me, and the things that make me who I am.
You won’t find ads here, and you won’t find a comments section either. Each essay is meant to stand on its own—timeless thoughts you can return to months or years later for reflection, unmarked by the fleeting opinions of the moment. There’s no fixed publishing schedule because these pieces are written when they’re ready, not when a calendar demands it.
If you’ve read this far, I want to say thank you. It’s been a really long time since I wrote anything. I hope you enjoyed this post and look forward to seeing you here again.
Welcome to V3.0. The internet’s second childhood. The return to first principles.
#DropsMic