My Personal Website

4/6/2020

David A. Windham

My Personal Website

What is a personal web page₁,or home page, or website? I recently read several articles recently that put me in the deep spin about what the web actually is and how I use it. It’s a forest from the trees₂ sorta of thing for me where I don’t often consider the medium. The first article I read was The Web is Industrialized and I helped industrialize it₃ by Dave Rupert. In it, he cites two other essays, Architects, gardeners, and design systems₄ by Jeremy Keith and Redesign: Gardening vs. Architecture₅ by Frank Chimero. All three of those fellas are folks I respect. The essays were written in reverse order with responses to one another. Just read them since I’ll certainly fall short trying to summarize.

I’ve also been thinking about it a bit recently because I’ve been considering the reason I first published this website. I’m going to be completely honest here, so please don’t hold it against me. I remember the first time I ‘Googled’ myself while sitting at a computer at my college library when some other ‘David Windham’ came up in the search results. I was thinking something along the lines of… ‘who does this fella think he is?’, I’ll fix that. I recently acquired the original domain that some other David Windham had used years ago. And so it goes, almost twenty years later I’m still building web sites and applications for a living. I’ve seen the ins and outs of the ‘business’ per se and somehow along the line, I’ve developed a kind of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance₆ approach to it.

I’m very particular about how I do anything. And by anything I mean laundry, yard work, cleaning, eating, sleeping… etc. I try to remind myself, while ruining my vision going through thousands of lines of code, the parts that I really enjoy. Over the years, as the essays suggest, the design process is becoming automated and industrialized. I’ve mostly try to be involved in building feature rich software and web applications, likely because the pay is slightly better and maybe partly because I’ve gotten bored of design as it relates to web development. I’ve been studying design since an early age because I’m a visual learner. I have a way with pattern recognition. I used to have this ability to tell you the year and model car based on the headlights coming at you in the dark. It could be the reason I have degree in studio art and it’s likely the reason I started as a web ‘designer’.

The coding part closely aligns to the part of me that wants to understand inner workings… vis-a-vis the motorcycle maintenance. I like to say now that “I’ve learned more from maintaining projects than I ever have from building them” and I’ve tried to develop an attitude towards my work wherein I find value in the day to day work and problem solving. I try to control all of the subtle things like matching all of my syntax highlighting between editors, following string naming conventions, making reusable blocks of code, standardizing my build systems, and automating anything possible.

I’ve been tossing around what kind of value do I get with my website and I’ve come to the conclusion that the value I’ve made on this site is mostly personal. Sure, I’m pitching my abilities here and there and I’ve made it easy for others to find me, but the majority of it’s value is as a personal communication tool. After I had completed my first year or so of paying web projects, I decided that I needed business cards. I still use the same cards because I bought way too many of them and don’t hand out enough. A post from Matt Cutts entitled The Best Business Card Ever₇ rolled into my reader in 2008 and that’s where the idea for this website design came from. He posted the original photo of a card he found in an old book he bought (the one in the bottom right below) and I found other similar versions online, but the tag lines just stuck with me and it’s still in the code of my homepage today. They’re hidden and you’d only read them if you’re using a screen reading device, but I use to just have them on the front page.

I’ve just found a live example of one of the first iterations @ http://windhamdavid.github.io/ and I just updated it after six years @ https://code.davidawindham.com/david/windhamdavid.github.com . Of course, I’ve added an interactive console with some embedded humor and a bunch of vector animations to it, but really the idea is still essentially the same as the front page of this website. Is a personal website just a business card, and am I’m a raconteur of sorts. What do I want from the internet? Sometimes, I think about the other David Windham’s out there wondering if I’ve accidentally stepped on their internet toes. It reminds me that my ability to essentially rent an address in cyberspace is somewhat an exercise in futility unless you have an objective.

Although I’ve been through it hundreds of times with clients, I’ve been reminded of the amount of reflection involved when you publish something for the world to see, much less making decisions about how you see yourself and want others to see you. I’ve also been making some business decisions about where to focus my billable hours. I’m fairly critical. My father liked to say that “you’re part of the everything sucks generation” and my wife likes to call it “GOM (Grumpy Old Man) syndrome”. I’m going to figure out how to own it and capitalize that trait. Maybe I’ll make a critical review chat bot. I’m planning on using a bot for the new site that’ll handle phone, text, email, and chat communications which will give me even more breathing room from the machines. I’ve only had a couple folks ever tinker with the interactive front page of this site even though I remember spending countless hours figuring out how to build out responses and store info from the terminal.

Anyway, I’m going to be doing a little motorcycle maintenance on this website to keep it running, but I don’t think I’ll ever really drastically change the design again. You can see the maintenance work @ https://code.davidawindham.com/david/daw . I’ve been hashing out some ideas about what to do with the new site. The primary concept is that I want it to be entirely functional. Ideally, I’d like to migrate over some of the functional bits of this site like the client portal, billing, project management and forms. I’ll put them all into one simple code base. I’d also like to automate some of my processes like communication and scheduling. I’d like it to be simple to understand and straightforward. I’m going to make it a little beast of burden working the interwebs to house and feed me. That’ll make more room for the more obscure fun stuff over here @ http://davidawindham.com and you can check my thought process on what is a personal website over at @ https://davidwindham.com.