Level 18 🥳

Hello there!

Today is the 27th of May. A lot of things have happened on this day in the past. But most importantly, 18 years ago, the mastermind behind the persona mostly known as "TTtie" came to life.

I've met so many great people throughout my life – both in real life and in countless online communities I've taken part in. I've also met a few enemies, of course – life isn't a rose garden. Some of the people I met are my greatest friends with whom I have many great memories. With others, we naturally parted ways and went each by our own. And of course, I also lost some friends sometimes, either by their fault, or by a fault of mine. (look, I'm not perfect either, and can behave like a total trashbin sometimes – if you're reading this and believe you've been mistreated by me, I'm sorry.) However, wherever on that scale you appear to be, you deserve a huge thank you for being a part of my journey through this world.

I know that I'm "old" now, yet it also feels like the whole life so far happened within just a fraction of it. Time flies, they say. Even I myself can't believe I have made it this far. But life doesn’t stop here. There is still a long way ahead of me and this is just the beginning.

The redesign

And to start it all off – here's the 4th (I think? I didn't count them) iteration of this website’s design. Feel free to say hi. I swapped out a lot of things. Both in what you see, and behind the scenes. Let's start from what you see – a full-blown visual redesign. Again. I've planned to do this for quite some time now, though and have played around with the design on my private website. And I switched to doing the styling by myself again to have more control over the visual layout.

Behind the scenes, my custom build script that glued everything together with EJS has shown some design flaws over time. For example – while writing a blog in raw HTML shows that you're able to use HTML, it is actually quite impractical. Or having to call your layout file @layout.ejs and having it forced for the entire folder in the directory tree. So, while looking around for design inspiration, I came across Eleventy. I can finally write blog posts (and even the landing page) using Markdown, while still being able to use HTML where needed. Because even though it might not look like it, programmers are still humans. And humans, by their nature, are somewhat lazy. Some are less, some are more.

So far though, I'm satisfied with both the new visual design and the new tooling. It empowers me to be able to do more and it is probably going to stay for quite a while.