Why a Personal Website

In my earlier article on building this personal website, I described the emotional journey that led to my first published side project — one I’m not afraid to share with others. While that post might serve as inspiration and show that a side project can be completed alongside a full-time job, it didn’t address the why.

This time, I want to focus on the reasons behind it. After all, dedicating so many hours and so much energy to a project needs strong justification.

1. To Show My Work

Let’s start with an obvious one — having my own domain allows me to share my creations with a broader audience.

“Social networks are great, but they come and go. (Remember Myspace? Friendster? GeoCities?) If you’re really interested in sharing your work and expressing yourself, nothing beats owning your own space online, a place that you control, a place that no one can take away from you, a world headquarters where people can always find you. […]

”Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back to my blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships—they all exist because I have my own little piece of turf on the Internet. […]

The beauty of owning your own turf is that you can do whatever you want with it. Your domain name is your domain. You don’t have to make compromises. Build a good domain name, keep it clean, and eventually it will be its own currency. Whether people show up or they don’t, you’re out there, doing your thing, ready whenever they are.”

That book was, if I remember correctly, my earliest inspiration for creating a website. Drawn to the idea of side projects that might grow into something bigger, I was naturally exploring the idea of sharing my work and getting discovered. I had kept a blog in 2014 about my life in Vietnam, where I had moved a year earlier, but it only lasted about a year before I lost motivation. It was also hosted on Blogspot and published under a name other than my own.

This time, I wanted a longer-lasting motivation, which is often the hardest part of side projects. I knew that raising the stakes by taking on more accountability could only help. That’s why I chose to share everything under damianpiatkowski.com. While it might not be your style to use your own name as a domain name, I’ll leave you with this thought before moving to the next reason:

“Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name.”

2. To Build a Public Repository of Insights and Solutions

One skill every knowledge worker should aim to develop is organization. In the job I know best — software development — this often means capturing solutions you’ve already worked hard to figure out. If a problem once took hours of googling and trial and error, you don’t want to repeat that effort the next time it appears. And yet many of us do, because the instinct to move on to the next task is stronger than the discipline of recording the solution. The payoff of maintaining your own database of past problems and useful information feels too delayed to be tempting in the moment.

Still, it’s essential. For me, keeping such a repository public — rather than scattered across messy Google Docs — has been a game changer. Publishing under my own name creates a higher standard: I have to present ideas clearly enough that others might benefit from them too. It’s still a personal repository, but a better one because the public nature forces me to take more care. Even if I end up being the only person who uses it, I still win. By putting in the effort to teach an idea, I retain it more deeply. And practically, it’s fast—I can just open my own domain in a browser whenever I need to revisit something.

The same applies to book insights. If I come across a quote that feels especially insightful or inspiring, I don’t want it buried in endless Kindle highlights. Instead, I place it in the context of an article, alongside other related quotes from different books. That way, someone else might benefit from the distilled collection — and I save myself the trouble of digging through all my notes when I just need one quote quickly. On my website, everything is already packaged neatly in an article, curated and easy to find.

3. To Create a Luck Magnet

I love this metaphor, though I’ll need to wait a few years to see whether the gravitational pull of my website actually works. For now, I’m trusting Ali Abdaal, whom I’ve been following for about eight years. In his video Why Everyone Needs a Personal Website, he explains:

“Level one is basically where my website is my online glorified personal CV and level two is where my website basically becomes a training ground for personal self-expression to help me get comfortable with putting myself out there. What about level three?

Level three is where the real magic happens, and that is where your website becomes a luck magnet. […] the more you put yourself out there, your ideas, your insights, your experiences the more you increase your surface area for luck. This is personal brand building one on one. By creating and sharing valuable content that is useful for some number of people, you give people a chance to find you, a chance to connect with you, and potentially open doors to opportunities that you didn’t even know existed.”

It makes sense to me, and I figured there’s no harm in giving it a try.

4. To Improve My Output–Input Ratio

Inspired by another video from Ali (can’t you tell I like his content?), titled The Consumption Trap – How to Finally Lock In, I realized I need to rethink how I spend my time outside of work and be more intentional with those choices.

“This is a little exercise you can try for yourself. Firstly, count how much time in the last 7 days you have spent consuming stuff. Screen time is a good proxy for this. How much time have you spent consuming content created by other people?

Once you’ve done that, estimate how much time you have spent creating something yourself. Now calculate your creation-to-consumption ratio. According to the Internet, the average person spends about 28 hours a week consuming content created by others, and only around 2 hours a week on their own acts of creation. That leads to a consumption-to-creation ratio of about 14 to 1. […]

I suspect your goals may involve freedom to some degree. You’d like the freedom to live on your own terms. Maybe you’d like financial freedom. Maybe you’d like time freedom. Maybe you’d like the ability to choose what you do for work. My hot take in this video is that if you have any goal related to freedom—and it’s a goal most people don’t accomplish—then you really want to shift your ratio of creation to consumption more in favor of creation.”

Ali Abdaal

Obviously, life shouldn’t be just work, and I do not regret spending hundreds of hours over the years in amazing worlds built in books like Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy (set in the ash-covered world of Scadrial, beginning with The Final Empire), or by game designers (my first of two playthroughs of Breath of the Wild being a magical time I still vividly remember 8 years later). But I’d like a more balanced ratio of getting inspired by consumed content versus creating some content myself. Get inspired by other people’s creations, but then use that inspiration to create something of your own.

It’s hard for me to say, “I’m proud I stuck with it and finished the whole game,” but much easier to feel that way about taking a project from start to finish. If that feels true now, I believe it will be even more so in ten years’ time.

5. To Shorten the Distance Between Idea and Execution

Another important reason was that having my own playground on the Internet brings any new idea much closer to execution from the start. I already have the experience of putting a personal project online, including figuring out the infrastructure. So if the next idea can use a similar tech stack, I’ll be able to reuse both knowledge and actual assets.

Secondly, that persistent voice in my head—“You need a website, you need to learn the basics of hosting, you need to share useful stuff”—has finally quieted. With it out of the way, I feel like I’ve freed up mental space for the next idea to take root.

And finally, when it comes to blogging, having a proper blog makes my ideas more likely to turn into finished posts. If something comes to mind, I now have a space where I can write it down, refine it, and publish it under my name with confidence.

6. Because It Might Be Just the Beginning

I’ve consumed a lot of content from entrepreneurs over the years, and one recurring insight in their success stories is that the first product or business idea is rarely the one. It often flops — but it’s also a necessary step to learn what works, what doesn’t, and how to move forward. My technical blog might be just the starting point on my portfolio website, but I know it could just as easily open doors I haven’t even imagined yet. And it’s precisely those unknown unknowns that excite me the most.

Another lesson I’ve heard from the same people is the value of journaling. Supposedly, it’s one of the best things you can do for your brain. I doubt I could keep a traditional daily journal consistently, at least not at this stage of life, but writing here feels like my own low-frequency version of it. And that’s good enough for me.

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There you go — those are the reasons that kept me motivated throughout this whole journey. I also wanted to take this snapshot for myself, so that in the future I can look back and see which assumptions turned out to be right, and which didn’t.

And if even one person reaches out to tell me this article helped them bring their side project to completion, that alone will make me happy.