Patryk Żurek

Hello everyone!

This is my long-awaited personal website.

Well, at least it looks this way. I have done hundreds of websites during my "career", but not a single one was really mine - they were either experiments, projects for clients, prototypes, or something which never progressed beyond a couple of commits. Whenever I had an idea for a personal website, I was somehow able to scale it to become an unmanageable project.

My friends know this all too well.

I've tried to make a personal website many, many times but somehow managed to overengineer them into something that I couldn't ever finish. Once I decided to recreate the whole look of Mac OS 9 interface in a browser. Another attempt turned into a website which would allow you to play a DOOM game while reading my resume, written on the walls (might still do that one tbh). Yet another idea was to create a website acting like an operating system rather than just displaying pages. All of these attempts were fun, but they had the same issue... I was spending way too much time setting up the base for the projects (trying to find the ideal tech stack) and forgot to actually write some content on them.

Eventually, I understood that in order to get a website that people would want to visit, I should treat it as something other than a software project and concentrate on making it a simple journal with interesting content. Cause content is what drives actual readers (not flashy CSS or newest web tech).

And that's how this website came to be!

Despite being way simpler than my previous attempts, it has plenty of engineering under its hood. One of my goals was to make it work with ancient web browsers. Each page is carefully constructed in such a way to be usable on web browsers dating back to late 1990s. No fancy JavaScript frameworks and browser APIs are required here as its primary goal is to display text (duh).

For anyone using curl, terminal browsers, or simply preferring a distraction-free environment, each page is available in plain text format by adding ?plain=1 to the end of URL. There is also an RSS feed for subscribing to new articles in a good old-fashioned way.

This website is my place on the Internet. This is where I will be publishing my projects, writing, downloads, notes on hardware, and whatever else I will want to preserve.

I am excited about my projects, but I am even more excited about having a customized place to tell you about them.

I don't want this website to be a simple portfolio. I want it to contain descriptions of my ideas behind projects, technical issues I faced while working on them, my notes on hardware I like playing with, and prototypes which did not make it to production. Some of those projects taught me more than the projects that did succeed, and I believe those stories are worth sharing.

Whether you are here thanks to one of my open-source projects, my apps, or just stumbled upon this website by chance, I am happy that you are here.

I hope that you will find something interesting, learn something new, or even get inspired to develop your own project.

Thank you for visiting.

Patryk <3