Ten Years of having a Personal Website: from Student to Senior · Greenpants Blog

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Written by Herman Groenbroek · 12 June 2026

Personal

Web Dev

Ten Years of having a Personal Website: from Student to Senior

Today marks 2026, the ten-year anniversary of my personal website you're reading this on. Let us, together, look back on the progress since, for nostalgia's sake. It is times like these that I love how convenient it is that much of internet history is kept by organisations like the Internet Archive. Let's get started with the trip down Memory Lane.

2016

View live (2016) .<br>I bought this domain and paid for hosting back in 2016: three years into my Bachelor's degree of Artificial Intelligence. In my first year, I was scared of the programming courses I had, because "programming is for smart people, not me". Two years later, I deployed my very own website.<br>Already for my first website, I wrote all content in English despite being native Dutch, living in The Netherlands, and with little intention to migrate. Interestingly, I promoted myself as "a Dutch photographer and student" – notably photography-first. That's because I wasn't an AI Engineer yet: I was a mere student still. What I could sell, however, was my experience in photography. In case you're wondering, these were my (supposed) frequently-asked questions:<br>Q: Can I hire you as a photographer?<br>Most definitely, yes!<br>Q: I have an old, scratched photograph that means a lot to me. Can you restore it digitally?<br>Absolutely, I'd be happy to.<br>Q: I'd like to see myself photoshopped onto the Martini Tower, or whatever. Would you be willing to do this?<br>Of course, but don't you have a more creative idea?<br>Q: I don't know much about photography but I really want to learn. Can you teach me?<br>I love teaching others about photography. Remember, you're only one email away from scheduling a meeting!<br>Q: Can you sing us a song, you're the piano man?<br>I'm afraid I'll have to pass. It's for your own good. Trust me.<br>Q: Show me your photographs / portfolio / prices!<br>That's not even a question - anyway, at the top of this page you'll find shortcuts that lead you to these sections<br>Q: Do you do YouTube videos at request?<br>If you have an idea, let me know. I'm always looking for inspiration.<br>Say what you will, but my website did have personality back then. Arguably more than it does today :-).<br>2019

View live (2019) .<br>Three years had passed, and I decided to upgrade. I wanted to start fresh & fancy and found just the template for this. It fit some of my photographs perfectly and made it all look a tad more professional. I had started my Master's graduation internship by this point. Time flew! I finally had some noteworthy experiences like visiting a student conference in Japan, participating in a hackathon and an extracurricular course on entrepreneurship. Note that Internet Archive's web extract for this year didn't include static files, that's why the background looks grey , but the next version two years later is visually quite similar, so let's continue swiftly.<br>2021

View live (2021) .<br>I was so proud of this fluffy dog photo I took with colourful bokeh. I figured it'd fit perfectly as the hero image of my website. Looking back years later, I still love it.<br>In the image where it says "a data scientist", I had a custom bit of javascript that would rotate this quote to other things I was—I never managed to summarize myself into a single role. Some of the other phrases were "a casual musician", "barely a web developer", and "pretty cool 😎".<br>At the bottom of the page, I started showing one of many random quotes that I'd come across online and enjoyed. Saved by the Internet Archive, for instance:<br>"If you don't wear the right clothes when you go for a run, you'll look like a criminal."<br>Anyway.<br>Let's continue.<br>2022

View live (2022) .<br>After three years of fluffy dog—since I had no idea whose dog this even was—I decided to make the hero image more personal. I used an image of me which I could only ever title "tech nomad at sea".<br>The quotes changed slightly. My experiences started to include actual data science. And I had been well into AI art by now, before stable diffusion even existed. As for the reach my website had: in consultancy, I occasionally heard people say "how cool that you have a website!". It must've helped land jobs at clients, though I never kept any metrics of how many visitors I actually got. I care about your privacy.<br>2023

View live (2023) .<br>In 2023, I wanted to see how much I could do with (local) LLMs to create my very own website from scratch. The previous websites were simple HTML, CSS and JS served through Apache, hosted on a Raspberry Pi at home for a couple of years. This year, I wanted to dip my toes into Django, although I couldn't get an entire blog up & running with it, so I ended up serving the blog through a separate Docker container running Wordpress. I had lots of trouble making sure the...