I built this site because every portfolio template I found felt like a lie. Clean grids, stock photos of people pointing at whiteboards, “passionate about creating impactful solutions” — none of it felt like me. So I did what any reasonable person does when they’re mildly annoyed: I spent way more time than necessary building something from scratch. Web development is my hobby, and hobbies should be weird.
Why does this site look like this
Because I find it genuinely funny: the contents, the looks, the ASCII, everything.
I am not a designer and I am not a frontend developer. My actual job is building things in Microsoft Power Platform — which, if you don’t know what that is, means I spend most of my days making enterprise software feel slightly less painful using a tool that mostly lets you drag and drop things. It is an entirely different discipline from web development, and I am kinda good at it.
What is Power Platform
You keep hearing that I am a developer, but not in code, in low-code, Power Platform and Microsoft. Fair question. Every company, at some point, needs roughly the same things: a way to collect and display information, a way to automate repetitive tasks, a way to report on what’s happening, and ideally all of it looking like it belongs together and requiring a login to use. Traditionally, you’d hire a team of developers, wait six months, and get something that half the company refuses to use because it’s confusing.
Power Platform is Microsoft’s answer to that problem. It is a suite of tools that sit on top of your existing Microsoft 365 and Azure infrastructure — meaning the data, users, and permissions you already have. Do you get paid as a Power Platform developer the same as a full-stack developer? No, and in my honest opinion we should not.
There is no authentication to implement and no SQL queries to write, because it uses authentication from Azure. There are no file servers or FTP to manage, because you use SharePoint for that. And you rarely need app registrations: you mostly use connection references, but you can also do app registrations, delegated permissions, service accounts and so on.
The whole thing runs inside your Microsoft tenant. No new infrastructure. No negotiating with IT about hosting. Permissions are inherited from Azure Active Directory. A junior developer — or sometimes a very capable non-developer — can build something genuinely useful in a week that would have taken a backend team three months. Those are ways of saving a lot of time and money. How does it stand against AI? We will see. The garden back at my balkan village is waiting for me to plant tomatoes.
Unfortunately, I can not build you something in Power Apps that is remotely touched by the internet, like a website. Got Microsoft 365? I can help you. Can I help you disrupt the ecosystem, 10x your paradigm, or redefine the future of stonks? No. That is not what I do. I build systems that handle contracts, HR approvals, facility management, financial reporting, and integrations with SAP, ServiceNow, DocuSign, and ERPs. The “low-code” label makes it sound like a toy. It is not.
Why Raster
So instead of picking a template, I picked Raster — a CSS grid system so minimal it barely qualifies as a framework — and built everything on top of it. One HTML file. One CSS file. No npm. No build tool. No node_modules folder large enough to collapse a star.
Look at how Rasmus has set up Raster, with no flex-boxes and stuff. That s**t broke me a few years ago and I dropped out of chasing a front-end career.
The ASCII art situation
There is ASCII art of my cat at the bottom of the homepage. She is a tabby cat, with that gray, black-ish and dark gray pattern. She did not contribute to this project in any meaningful way. The caption reads “I could most definitely have done it without her.” This is true. She mostly sat on my lap, making me uncomfortable and probably judging me.
I added the ASCII art because I think it is deeply, wonderfully dorky. The internet used to be full of this kind of thing before everyone decided everything needed to look like a Figma prototype. I miss that. This is my small protest.
I also added a kind of ASCII picture of myself, because I wanted to make it personal but don’t feel comfortable sharing an image of me online. I know, with all the information and images of me on socials. At least I try my best. Bots are crawling all over, especially on websites, and they are more effective on static pages like mine.
Why a blog instead of social media? Is this 2003?
I have a Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and I rarely post on any of them. The problem with social media is that it flattens everything. A thought that took me three weeks to form gets the same real estate as someone’s lunch photo.
I wanted somewhere I could write longer, think slower, and not have an algorithm decide whether it was worth showing to anyone, even if no one ever reads it. I also do not want to build an audience. I want to write things down. There is a difference.
No dependencies
This site has no npm dependencies. No JavaScript frameworks. No third-party scripts. The fonts come from Bunny Fonts — a GDPR-friendly alternative to Google Fonts that does not phone home to Mountain View every time someone loads a page.
This is not because I am paranoid (I am a little paranoid). Aren’t these reason enough? Plain HTML and CSS do not have supply chain attacks, hopefully. They also do not have breaking changes.
This is the hello-world post. More to come — probably about Power Platform, probably about building things that make people laugh, e-ink projects like TRMNL, Xteink X4, or TRMNL with Xteink X4; definitely not about optimizing conversion funnels and disrupting the ecosystem one blockchain, web3, AWS and React Native at a time.