David-Dickinson.com
This one started as a redirect.
I wanted to put a domain name on my CV and have it go somewhere credible, so for a while david-dickinson.com just forwarded to LinkedIn. Whether anyone ever followed it I genuinely don’t know. But eventually it felt like a missed opportunity, so I built it into a proper portfolio — HTML, CSS, a little JavaScript, doing what portfolios do.
Since then it has been rebuilt in almost everything. AngularJS, React, PHP Laravel, NextJS. Each rebuild was at least partly an excuse to try something new, which is either a good habit or a bad one depending on how generously you’re reading it. The Laravel version was probably the best technically — I was most comfortable in it, it showed — but PHP hosting without a VPS is more trouble than it’s worth, and eventually the infrastructure reality wins. The NextJS version was the most considered, built with SEO in mind and hosted on Netlify, and it served reasonably well for a while.
Then I started being honest with myself about what the portfolio was actually for.
I’m not trying to land a job as a developer or a designer. A traditional portfolio — here are my projects, here are my skills, hire me for this specific thing — doesn’t really fit where I am or where I’m going. I already have a blog. I don’t need another one. And a CV lives on LinkedIn where it belongs.
What I actually wanted was something in between and beyond all of those things. A technical narrative. A record of the things I’ve built, tried, broken, and learned from — the hobby projects and the professional skills and the explorations that didn’t go anywhere and the ones that did — connected by themes rather than separated by category. Something where you could follow a thread like Linux from the late nineties to today and it would actually make sense as a journey.
The current version is built in Astro. A collection of collections. Projects, explorations, on-the-job work, all tagged consistently so the threads are visible across everything. It’s the most purposeful version this domain has ever had — which is a strange thing to say about a site that has existed in some form for years, but here we are.
The write-up you’re reading right now is part of it.