Rebuilding my corner of the internet

July 2026

I tore the old site down. Not because it was broken — because it was loud. It had a matrix rain theme, a halo intro, a dynamic island header. Each one made sense the week I added it. Together they read like a demo reel for effects I had learned, not a place where I actually live online.

So this rebuild started with a rule borrowed from the sites I kept coming back to: the base has to be quiet. A name, a few honest paragraphs, links that work. Everything expressive earns its place on top of that, one layer at a time, and every layer has to be removable.

What I stole, and from whom

From ikeacrisp.com: the whole posture. Numbered bio blocks, a short summary that expands only if you ask it to, and a small assistant creature that answers questions about the owner so the page itself does not have to over-explain.
From muhraufan.com: the language shuffle. His site flips between English and Japanese with every letter scrambling in transit. Mine flips to Korean — 김상윤 is my name on the other side of the toggle — and visitors leave holographic guest cards the way his visitors leave drawings.
From chanhdai.com: the discipline of the experience section, the stack grid, and the command palette. Press the K-key combo, or honestly just start typing, and the whole site is searchable.
From simeydotme's pokemon-cards-css: the holo foil. My wife and I are a trainer card now. This is non-negotiable.
From cuelume: the sounds. Fourteen tiny cues synthesized live in the browser, no audio files. There is a mute button and it remembers your choice.
From the Evangelion UI artboard by Peng Wang: the third theme. Amber glow, red danger labels, blinking hexes. The theme switch into it plays a half-second of Asuka, because if you are going to have an eva theme you should commit.

Why a data architect cares about any of this

My day job is deciding how things are defined before anyone builds on top of them — schemas, metadata, lineage. A personal site is the same problem at 1/1000th the scale. The content lives in typed data files. The themes are design tokens. The guest cards are a table with row-level security. The assistant only answers from a knowledge file checked into the repo.

Quiet base, governed layers, expressive surface. Same architecture I sell at work, except this time the stakeholder review is my wife telling me which holo finish looks best.