You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. -- Steve Jobs
Normally, I’m not a quote person, and don’t get inspired by them much. Sometimes they provide great insights, but even in that case, I prefer to strain them through my own experience and see what remains.
However, in recent times, I’m experiencing a domino effect in my digital life and organization. I was able to realize almost all my dreams without realizing. This made me wonder how I did this in a short amount of time, at least for me.
I have a homepage (or landing page if you prefer the term) for a long time now. It all started with flavors.me, a now defunct service providing customizable landing/link pages which I used with a subdomain of a domain owned by a family member. After they closed shop, I continued to use the same subdomain directly. Then, one late night I decided to buy my own domain on a whim, and bayindirh.io was born.
The domain sat idle at first. Then I installed a web server to my “utility” cloud server which I used as an external eye to test things. This allowed to move my homepage there. Gotten bit by the self-hosting bug, I started to move services onto that server, streamlining tons of things in the process.
Next was my blog. I have experimented with Jekyll for a long time. While the idea was to generate “static” web pages, none of the useful templates were truly static, and making your own template was requesting an amount of time I didn’t have. As a result, the blog idea was frozen until which I found this platform, which allowed me to use my own domain, and being equally minimalist at the same time.
Same story happened for my digital garden: After finding a suitable solution which allowed to bring my own domain, everything clicked.
As it turned out, the act of buying a domain in the middle of a night because of me wanting a “permanent address” on the internet changed everything. Slowly in the beginning, but faster as I walked along the path. Now, that domain serves (directly or indirectly) all the things I wanted to have and grants me freedom to tinker, explore and do things by myself.
Without realizing, I have removed a great deal of friction from a lot of processes by buying that domain, and this allowed me to find and explore more services with the same frictionless nature and connect under my own domain, giving me a distributed yet interconnected infrastructure which allows me to create and communicate with the world.
While this process was a small step for humanity, it was a big one for me, and started a nice domino effect allowing me to realize my dreams and learn a lot, which I can only see when I look backwards.
Perhaps, Steve Jobs was right. Everybody should look back now and then. Because doing it makes you understand what happened for what reason, and makes finding the next dot easier. However, this is a subject for a future post.
Until next time,
Be kind.