Marc Santos

So… what’s the point of all this?

Honestly? Not much.

I just wanted my own personalized @ email address, and this website just so happened to be a side effect.

But looking back at more than a decade of iterations, migrations, experiments, and rewrites, it’s hard to argue the experience was for nothing. This site became my sandbox — a place to test ideas, break things safely, and learn technologies I wouldn’t otherwise touch in my day job.

And thanks to the Wayback Machine¹, I can actually see how far it’s come.

The Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive runs a service called the Wayback Machine. In a nutshell, it crawls the web and takes snapshots of websites like this one. These snapshots are semi-complete copies, usually preserving HTML, CSS, and JavaScript dependencies.

For simplicity, I’ve taken screenshots of the archived snapshots. Unfortunately, some of the dependencies I used weren’t included in the archive. This omission makes some previous versions of the website look worse than they actually were. 😂

October 2010 — The Domain Era

I registered my primary domain² in October 2010. Unfortunately, I don’t recall what it looked like back then. All I know is that it wasn’t crawled by the Wayback Machine until about three years later.

Somewhere during this period, I signed up for Google Apps³, which gave me personalized access to services like Gmail, Drive, and Docs.

Mission accomplished — custom email address secured. Everything after that was bonus.

October 2013 — The Blogger Years

I started using Blogger — though my use of it predates the archived snapshot by a couple of years.

My only real gripe was the lack of file-level access to the server. But despite that limitation, I did fairly well for myself. Working within the publishing tools, customizing templates, and understanding the platform’s constraints⁴ still got me close to the look and feel I had envisioned.

Not pictured was the default landing page — a full-width image carousel displaying a selection of photographs I had taken. This focus on showcasing my photography would continue to be a core part of the site in later iterations.

October 2016 — Breaking Out

Around this time, I pivoted the site from a blogging configuration to a single-page informational website. It defeated the purpose of the Blogger platform, but then again, I was mostly using it as free hosting.

This was also when I began experimenting with AWS⁵, specifically Elastic Beanstalk to manage the virtual machines hosting my server-side (PHP) code.

I’ve apparently been using my tagline for quite some time:

“To lead and work closely with experienced Software Developers on a variety of challenging projects.”

When I originally wrote that out of college, “challenging” meant greenfield projects.

In reality, it often meant maintaining legacy systems — not that I’m complaining.

August 2018 — Full AWS Migration

By this point, the site was fully migrated to AWS.

This gave me more control over the infrastructure and opened the door to experimenting with other web technologies. At least that was the idea — until the service fees arrived. 💸

To be fair, the cost wasn’t outrageous. But going from paying nothing to paying something feels significant.

On the plus side, I was no longer restricted to static HTML with inlined CSS and JavaScript. I now had an environment where I could properly publish projects built with frameworks and tools like AngularJS, Handlebars, and Node.js.

I remember taking the photo above before attending a friend’s wedding. It was rare for me to wear a suit, so I figured I might as well document the occasion. 🤵

September 2018 — Static, Distributed, Automated

The current iteration was rebuilt using GatsbyJS.

This time, I wired the workflow across multiple platforms. The primary repository is on Azure DevOps, which Cloudflare Pages picks up to build and deploy the project to production. GitLab and GitHub act as backup mirrors, ensuring the code is safely stored across multiple services.

It may sound like overkill for a personal website — and maybe it is — but that’s kind of the point.

This setup allows me to experiment with different CI/CD ecosystems while keeping deployment clean and automated. A simple push to a remote repository eventually makes its way to production without me manually moving a single file.

Compared to where this site started — inlined CSS inside a hosted blogging template — that still feels a little magical.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep this setup, but I’m enjoying how it has turned out so far.

Beyond technology, this setup also gives me the flexibility to highlight another passion: displaying the photographs I’ve taken over the years in a polished, dynamic way.

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Moving Forward

And there you have it — the journey of a personal website that began in 2010 and has now spanned more than a decade.

There are many websites like this one. But this one is mine.

Throughout all of this, I’ve been working full-time as a software developer. While the technology stacks between my personal projects and professional work don’t always overlap, that’s exactly what keeps things interesting.

Going forward, I plan to use this website to document:

• Technological experiments
• Issues I’ve encountered
• Solutions (and sometimes better alternatives discovered later)
• The photographs I’ve taken over the years, capturing moments and experiences that matter to me

I may not be the first to write about these things.

But that doesn’t really matter.

The point is to build, to learn, and to leave a trail — more than ten years in the making — for the next version of myself to look back on.

Author’s note: For brevity, not all archived snapshots were included in this article.