---
title: "Why I Built This Site"
description: "The thinking behind guden.tr: why personal sites still matter in an age of platforms, and what I plan to write about here, software, business, and the rest."
date: 2024-09-15
category: Personal
readingTime: "1 min read"
---


Three days ago I bought a domain. guden.tr. My name, my country code, nothing else.

It cost less than a decent dinner in Kadıköy. And yet I stared at the checkout screen for an unreasonably long time before clicking confirm. Not because of the money. Because a personal domain means a personal site, and a personal site means writing in public, and writing in public means showing your thoughts to strangers and not being able to unsay them.

I clicked anyway.

---

HMD Developments already has a site. It answers the professional questions well enough: what I build, what the work does, how to get in touch.

It does not tell you what I think when I go for a run along the Bosphorus. It does not explain why I chose one database over another on a side project at two in the morning. It does not contain a single sentence that starts with "I."

That is the gap.

A project site's job is to explain the project. It presents the thing, what it does, how to reach whoever made it. Everything is calibrated to reduce friction between "what is this?" and "right, I understand." That framing is correct for the work. It is wrong for a person.

A personal site answers a question that no project page can: what does this person actually care about?

---

So here is what goes on guden.tr.

Software, obviously. Architecture decisions I found interesting. Technical things I got wrong and what I learned from getting them wrong. Honest breakdowns of projects, both the ones I am proud of and the ones I would rather forget.

But also everything else. Building things while still being a student. Sports. Music. The strangeness of being bilingual in a global industry. Design opinions. Business opinions. Opinions I have not fully formed yet that might embarrass me in three years. All fair game.

The writing happens when something gets stuck in my head. Some posts will be long technical pieces. Others will be short observations. There is no editorial calendar. If I force a schedule, the writing will sound forced, and forced writing is worse than no writing at all.

---

The site itself runs on Next.js with the App Router, deployed to Cloudflare Workers. Styling is a single CSS file. Blog posts are Markdown, parsed with gray-matter. There is an RSS feed for the people who still use RSS readers, and I say that with genuine admiration, not irony.

No CMS. No database. No third-party analytics platform tracking your scroll depth and cursor movements. The code is simple because [personal sites should be simple](/blog/design-as-communication). The only things that matter are that pages load quickly, the text is comfortable to read, and new posts are easy to publish.

You are reading the first post. The next one will be about something more interesting. Probably software. Possibly not. We will see.