For some weeks now, I have been again thinking about this website and my goals for it. As part of it I looked at how
it evolved and how it influenced me. Surprisingly this year, around summer, it will be the 16th anniversary of my first
site appearing. For me this is a summary of things that happened, an analysis and a little bit of nostalgia. For you, it
may be some lessons learned, encouragements and a more typical blog post. Let's enjoy ourselves.
2009-2011
In 2009 I decided I want a website. My main reason was it's cool. I will firmly defend this even today. I was
migrating from one Polish startup web hosting to another for half of this period. Later on, I switch to shell sharing
communities. The kind that lets you use some limited resources, host low traffic website or e-mail, have persistent
irssi session, and similar applications. I hopped between them as each one of them went defunct. I sweat it wasn't my
fault!
Because of the hops I was forced to learn to automate remote deployments, make good friends with number of tools,
briefly use most of popular Linux distributions at the time, and I got to know pretty much all popular web admin panels
(again, at the time). On the human side, I also met some interesting people in Polish Linux, UNIX and web development
communities.
By the end of 2011 datashellz.org, the last shell sharing server I used, collapsed and I settled on a machine in my
attic and/or basement. Pick whichever fits better your image of me. Of course, server was built with scrap parts and
running only during selected hours. Since my ISP didn't do static IP allocations in my neighbourhood I used a free
dynamic DNS service. Throughout this time I hosted Soldat and TeeWorlds game servers to play with friends, personal
copy-paste and file upload PHP service, and occasionally services and resources for random projects (i.a., Icecast).
Content of the website centred around those with nothing really particular. I also shared some text files on phreaking.
The designs were based on websites of two play by e-mail games Starfire and Full Thrust.
2012-2016
Sometime around 2012 RamNode was founded and I stumbled upon it. They offered a
VPS for like $5 for a quarter of a year. I don't think they know how much I appreciate them to this day even though I no
longer use their services. Anyway, this was the first time I ended up with a somewhat decent machine that was "somewhere
out there" amazingly accessible compared to my attic and/or basement, and I was almost completely responsible for
it. I had to cut off game servers since the platform wasn't up for the task but website was up and running. I stuck
around with free DNS until OVH got their own top-level and sold some domains for cheap.
Around 2013 maybe 2014 I got into Arma 2. Started playing on public servers and somehow I joined a Polish gaming
community. In a turn of events I became one of their system administrators and made some graphic design side-quests
along the way. Access to quite decent machines allowed me to restart my little game server hosting. Of course, this was
agreed on. For about two and a half years I managed Arma, Counter-Strike and some other game servers for the community.
Among them: Farming Simulator server. It was a rare experience of installing a full game via forwarded X window of an
installation wizard running on wine only to get a headless server.
During this period my website contained mostly small jokes, YouTube player, some anime or manga pictures, links, and
a continued paste-bin service. Apparently, I had some sort of mascot, too. I changed designs quite often and I was
active on Stack Overflow in HTML, CSS and JavaScript tags. I learned by resolving other people problems and by having
fun with a fair bit of my own problems created by mostly pointless ideas.
2017-2019
I parted my way with the Arma community after my interest faded and they moved to Arma 3. My little PC was too (and
still is) too slow to properly run it. After dozens upon dozens of websites designs I decided it's time to throw
everything out of the window.
It stayed this way until the direct predecessor of this iteration. It was just a bunch of markdown files with
various documentation and instructions that I wrote down with intention to streamline tasks, verify them against
upstream documentation, and reference once a while. Being able to share it was an acknowledged side-effect.
As for the design, the minimalism prevailed.
2020 and cont.
This is it, the last entry of the journey so far. On 17 April 2020, I published first blog post of this
iteration.
I removed it like five months later. Then I published some more things and I removed those too. I'm impressed some
of the entries made it into 2025 maybe I finally learnt some restraint. Or maybe I'll nuke this page tomorrow. There's
one event worth mentioning. On 25 July 2021, I initialized git repository for the blog, so whatever I do the trace will
be more visible. Although, I'd say me and Wayback Machine did good job archiving these 16 years of my pointless personal
content.
I liked the journey I had and I like it here. I plan to continue, so see you in 16 years!