Welcome to my new personal website. I’ve always liked the idea of my own personal website, and whether it’s useful or not, it’s still a cool feeling to have one’s own little corner on the web 😁. I’m planning to just have it be a description of me and some of the stuff I’ve worked on, perhaps with a few blog posts here and there.
It’s fun to have it be a bit more of a personal portfolio or personal site compared to my old website about my “internet persona” #Birckk. It was built with WordPress, and I even got some help from a friend with certain elements, like some of the review functionality. The initial WordPress setup is from around 2018. It’s now just rotting on GitHub without anyone’s knowledge 👀.
The old site
My old website was my first attempt at making my own personal site, back at the end of high school / gymnasium. I was interested in video games and thought a good way to put that knowledge to use was to write some reviews and do something similar for some of my other hobbies. Then the rest was just a mixture of various fun challenges and things that could be fun or interesting to showcase.
I’m glad I made it and put in the effort, but it was of essentially no value to any human on earth other than myself. Well, almost. I did once, back in the pre-AI era, get an email from Margie, who was volunteering after school with two children who wanted to become technology teachers. They had found my typing article while exploring that interest.
“They both had fun exploring your keyboarding resources as well! Thank you!”
— Margie, email correspondence, 2020
One of them had found another keyboarding resource with lessons and games and was excited to ask if I would add it to my guide.
“I told him there was no harm in asking and you might enjoy hearing about a couple of kids enjoying your website. :)”
I ended up adding their suggested link to the section about getting started with ten-finger typing and wrote back to thank them. To this day, I still don’t know if it was real or some random prank. But it felt genuine, and at worst, it’s a fairly wholesome prank to say some schoolchildren found it helpful and useful.
The typing guide itself was basically a collection of everything I had found useful while learning to type with all ten fingers myself. It covered getting started with TypingClub, sticking with it when it felt slow, and focusing on accuracy before speed. Then I went a bit further with typing tests and games like Epistory to make practising more fun.
Looking through the old files, I also found everything from organising a Steam library to reviews of games, anime and board games. One long list covered couch multiplayer games like TowerFall, Overcooked and Jackbox, with little descriptions of what made them fun to play with friends. A lot of it was just me writing down what I liked, what annoyed me and whether I thought something was worth someone else’s time. Very much a collection of whatever I was into back then 😁.
In the end, it was left to gather dust after a year or so of small changes, but it was a fun project.
The new site
This one brings together a bit more of me: work, school, some creative stuff and other things from recent years, all in a tighter package. There are still plenty of little visual details to play around with, but the idea is pretty simple. Somewhere to look around and get an idea of who I am and what I’ve been up to.
It’s built with Astro 7, with TypeScript for the code and Tailwind CSS for much of the styling.
I’ve also used the site as a practical playground for agentic engineering, experimenting with how I set up AI agents and organise the work around them. That includes giving them the right context, breaking work into manageable tasks and reviewing and testing what they produce.
That’s it for now
Now I have a place to put things as I work on them, and hopefully a reason to write about a few of them too. It’ll probably keep changing as I find more things to add or mess around with. Feel free to have a look around 😁.