Why another site?
If you didn't know, there is already a-mamal.com. It is the first dynamic version of my personal website, and it has a rather different purpose.
I wanted a-mamal.com to be a relatively minimal overview of myself and my work. It's meant to be more professional, although I still wanted it to have some personality. It shows the things I have built, the technologies I work with, and gives an overview of who I am as a developer. But there is a limit to how much you can put on a site like that.
There are things I work on that don't really belong there. Things like experiments, half-finished ideas, things I'm trying to understand and others that break for reasons I don't understand yet. There are also the decisions I make and might later change my mind about.
I didn't want all of that to disappear just because it wasn't polished enough to put on my main website. That's where a-mamal.dev comes in.
I don't want this site to only show the finished result. I want it to show some of what happens before the finished result exists.
Learning in public
Both a-mamal.com and a-mamal.dev are connected to the idea of learning in public.
I've found that a lot of the things I learn while building projects disappear surprisingly quickly. I might solve a problem after spending hours trying different approaches, feel very pleased with myself, and then a few months later have absolutely no idea how I solved it.
I do keep notes. I have README files that I try to keep as detailed as a README can be, and they live on GitHub. I also have my own ways of keeping track of things, which could be an article on its own. But those are mostly useful for documenting a project or for reminding myself about something later.
I wanted something a little different. I wanted a place where I could document things while they are happening.
Not just: "Here is the finished project."
But also: "Here is what I was trying to do. Here is what I tried. It didn't work. I tried something else. Okay, that worked."
And sometimes:
“I have absolutely no idea why that worked.”
That process is part of development too.
Why is it already deployed?
This site is very much still in its early stages. In fact, that's intentional.
I've been thinking about creating a-mamal.dev almost since a-mamal.com was deployed, back when that site was still in its own early stages. I could have waited until I had a proper design, a complete content structure, several finished projects, and a carefully planned collection of articles.
But then I would probably have spent a very long time preparing a website for documenting the things I was doing instead of actually documenting them.
So I decided to just deploy it.
It doesn't need to be finished before I can start using it.
Actually, having it unfinished feels appropriate.
This site is supposed to grow alongside everything I'm learning and building. If I change the structure, redesign something, remove a page, make something unnecessarily complicated, or discover a much better way of doing something later, that's part of the story.
What I want this site to become
I don't have a completely fixed plan for a-mamal.dev yet.
I know I want it to contain projects, experiments, articles, notes, and things I'm learning. I want to be able to write about technical problems, design decisions, ideas, failures, successes, and the little things that don't necessarily deserve a place on a professional website.
Some things might become proper articles. Some might remain short notes. Some experiments might never become anything useful at all.
And that's okay.
I don't want to decide everything this site has to be before I start using it.
For now, I mostly want it to be a place where I can build things, think about them, write about them, and leave some evidence that I was there while it was happening.
I suppose we'll see what it becomes.