Why now?!

Darren, you’ve had a Coming Soon page for almost 15 years and you’ve been doing just fine. Why would you bother building your own site now?

- Imaginary interviewer

Thanks for asking! Yes, I am the classic cliché of the chef who doesn’t cook for himself. After spending hours on end slaving in front of a hot stove, would you want to come home and make yourself an immaculately prepared, nutritious feast? No. You grab a bowl of whatever cereal is closest and be done with it. I imagine this scenario is analogous to pretty much any profession, mine not withstanding. After 15 years of spending my days (and often weekends and evenings) building websites for other people, the last thing I wanted to do with my free time was build one more just for myself.

But enough was enough. To those of you who weren’t fortunate enough to see what my site has been for the past decade and a half, it was a cheezy Flash-based “Coming Soon” page that’s only “feature” was a countdown clock that would constantly change its countdown-target to a random time.

Yup. There it is. Glorious.

About a year ago I realized I was never going to get around to building my own site, plus Flash had long since gone out of favour. So I decided I would at least redirect the site straight over to my LinkedIn profile. Not a terrible compromise I suppose. At least people were then able to see some of my portfolio pieces, my education, awards won, etc… But it was hardly an adequate long-term solution. Which brings us here.

So, why now?

- Same nosey guy

I was getting to that. Most freelancers are subject to something that full-time staff don’t usually get to experience…feast or famine. Often I’m flush with work and everything is great. Other times though it seems like no one needs a website anymore and the whole Internet fad has finally passed. These are the times that I would normally devote a healthy mix of my time towards R&D, and playing video games. Not gonna say which I spent more time on. This time though, the shame of a web developer not having his own site, which would normally just be a small nagging feeling in the back of my mind, now took a firm stance right in front of me and would not be silenced by any of my other usual distractions. Luckily, a perfect storm of events occurred (or rather, didn’t occur). Work was quiet; I didn’t have any video games I was currently into; there were no fires that needed to be put out. And so, here we have it. It took almost 15 years, but it’s done. I hope you like it.