About myself
Hello, I'm Will from New Zealand 🇳🇿.
I work as a Software Engineer. Most of my experience is in backend with a focus on building scalable and resilient cloud-native systems. Though I have experience in most areas of the stack: frontend, databases, CI/CD, etc. I'm deeply interested in other areas too, such as machine learning, infrastructure, and platform engineering. In fact, I originally wanted to be a computer (hardware) engineer back in school, but I got drawn into the software engineering course at uni.
My programming language of choice these days is Kotlin (sorry, Scala). Though most of my professional experience is in C# (which just narrowly edges out Java, can you believe that?).
Beyond work, I have a few interests:
- Anything tech 💾. I love tinkering with hardware and networks. I have a homelab that is rapidly growing and self-host where possible
- Maths, science, and engineering 📡
- Finance and economics 📈
- Fitness 💪. In particular, weightlifting, running, and swimming
- Cooking 🍲. I believe in using quality whole ingredients, then you can make almost anything healthy 😋
- Travelling, camping, and hiking 🏕️
- Gaming 🎮. I was extremely competitive at this growing up. These days I'm more into sim racing 🏎️
- Sports ⚽. I was also competitive at this growing up; I played football, badminton, waterpolo, and I'm still skiing ☃️. These days I mainly follow motorsport (WEC and F1) but try to catch any major sporting events such as the Olympics
What I want to do more of:
- Music production 🎹
- Photography 📷
In general, I like things that are: simple, quality, sustainable, and thoughtful. I think the world would be better if we slowed down and built more things like this.
About this site
I host my blog and other pages which (unlike the blog) are kept updated rather than posted in chronological order (e.g. recipes).
This site is built with 11ty which is a static site generator (similar to Hugo or Jekyll). This means I mostly write markdown files and 11ty generates the html.
This site is deployed to Cloudflare via GitHub Actions.
While I've used AI to help me build this site, none of the content is AI generated (see point 3 below).
Why I created this site
And why you should consider doing the same!
1. Personal Brand
I simply think this is important. I also think it's cool you can have your own place on the internet.
2. Quality and control
Having my own site reminds me of the old internet. You used to have a lot more customisation available (remember the old social media, YouTube, etc?) and the quality was overall higher.
These days the internet (and world in general) is consolidated to a few select sources with algorithmic feeds. I simply want more control over my own content, even if it means fewer hits.
3. Writing = Thinking
Many of us (myself included) get stuck in a consumption loop. This is especially potent given the modern web.
While initially more difficult, I think it's extremely important to produce your own content. Even if you aren't the best and nobody views your work, it's more satisfying and valuable to yourself as you use that creative part of the brain. (Not to mention, you have to start somewhere.)
Writing in particular forces you to slow down and truly think. Unfortunately we are losing this skill, especially given the developments in AI. In the future (maybe even now) there'll be groups of people that can't produce and therefore think for themselves. So going forward, this will be an even bigger differentiator.