The Story Behind My Digital Home: How This Blog Found Its Shape

There are so many blogs and portfolios out there. Places like LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, dev.to and numerours others mushrooming with the LLM generated content. So, why to have another one?

For a long time, I carried around the idea of documenting my personal journey of learning new skills and bulding stuff. I have been using obsidian for notetaking and personal knowledge manegment, but I wanted a space on the internet where I could think aloud, build openly, and record the fragments of curiosity that are often lost in the ephemeral spikes of my neurons.

The Restlessness That Started It All

For most of my career, I lived in research notebooks, academic papers, long Slack threads, and private repos. The ideas were everywhere, but nowhere I could call home. Whenever I tried to start a blog, it felt too formal. Too polished. Too detached from the way I actually learn and build.

Then I started shifting deeper into DevOps, homelabs, cloud engineering, and AI experimentation. Suddenly my days were filled with configurations, failures, breakthroughs, midnight refactors, and the kind of hard-earned lessons only debugging at 2 AM can teach.

I needed a place to put all of it. Not as documentation — but as a story.

That’s when this blog started taking shape.

Finding the Right Foundation

The real story begins with a search.

I spent weeks browsing themes and frameworks with a feeling I can only describe as “technical homesickness.” Everything looked polished but empty — nice surfaces, no soul.

And then I found Astro Sphere.

Minimal. Fast. Thoughtful. Soft around the edges. The kind of design that invites you to breathe instead of impress.

I remember loading its demo and thinking:

Yes. I can tell my story here.

Not because it was perfect — but because it was a foundation I could shape.

Turning the Template Into a Home

Building this site became its own adventure. Not a sprint, not a checklist — but a quiet shaping of identity.

I started with the smallest detail: the logo.

Just a simple “V.” inside a circle. Minimal, almost understated.

But deeply personal — like signing the corner of a canvas.

Then came the colors.

A soft, warm palette inspired by the feel of coffee shops where I often think best. Neutral tones. Quiet contrast. Nothing loud.

Typography became a whole chapter of its own.

I spent evenings adjusting line heights and reading long paragraphs out loud to feel the rhythm. I wanted the experience to be gentle — like reading notes passed between friends.

The layout followed the way I think.

Clean left navigation. Uncluttered content area. Enough whitespace to breathe.

A digital room you can walk into.

And then came the invisible parts.

Metadata. SEO. Search functionality. Accessibility checks. Sitemap tuning.

A home looks simple only because the wiring is right.

A Tale of Two Sites

As the blog took shape, something unexpected happened: it began competing with another idea — my consulting brand.

One space wanted to be exploratory, personal, evolving. The other needed to be structured, focused, confident.

They were like two very different characters in the same story.

So I gave each its own home.

This site became the place where I think in public.

Where I write about Kubernetes experiments, homelab setups, DevOps workflows, semantic data engineering, GenAI — and the messy, fascinating process behind it all.

DatumInt became the place where I speak as a professional.

Clear. Purposeful. Designed for clients.

Separating them wasn’t a business decision — it was a narrative one. Two voices. Two rooms. Both needed to exist.

What I’m Building Here, Piece by Piece

This blog isn’t a portfolio. It’s not a marketing funnel. It’s not a polished showroom.

It’s more like a workshop — half-finished projects, soldering fumes, whiteboard sketches, mistakes, revisions, and the occasional “aha!” moment that changes everything.

Some chapters I’ll share soon:

• my Kubernetes homelab journey

• experiments with agentic AI

• lessons learned from semantic data modeling

• personal notes on DevOps philosophy

• stories behind the CLI tools and scripts I build

-long-form explorations of technology I’m curious about

Some posts will be polished. Some will be raw. All will be honest.

The Story Continues

This website is not the final version of anything. It’s a milestone—one chapter in a larger narrative of learning, building, unlearning, and rediscovering.

I don’t know yet how it will evolve. And that’s the point.

For now, it stands as a quiet place for:

• ideas

• experiments

• stories

• technical wanderings

• reflections that don’t fit anywhere else

If you’re reading this, thank you. You’re walking through a space I’ve wanted to build for years.

And the best part is: the story is still being written.