---
title: "Why I built this site"
description: "I'm always learning, always reading and always writing, and I wanted one place to put it."
url: "https://michael.zazon.us/notes/why-i-built-this-site"
published: "2025-10-29T12:00:00-04:00"
kind: "take"
subject: "tools"
tags: ["this-site"]
---
I'm always learning, always reading and always writing. Most of that writing lives in my Obsidian vault, where it helps me think but doesn't help anybody else. I wanted a place for the pieces worth sharing, so I built one.

For a long time my presence online was a LinkedIn profile and a résumé on VisualCV. Both are fine when someone wants my work history. Neither is a good place to talk about a book I'm reading or a tool that surprised me. I've done long-form writing before as a co-author of the [AWS Cookbook](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492092606), and I'd like to write more often, in smaller pieces.

The other reason is that building it was fun. I got to geek out on [Astro](https://astro.build), Cloudflare Pages, publishing straight from Obsidian and a bunch of AI agent workflows, and I learned something from every one of them. Learning by building a thing I'll actually use is right up my alley. The details are in [How this site is built](https://michael.zazon.us/notes/how-this-site-is-built).

So what goes here? Cloud architecture and software engineering, since that's my work, plus the stuff I geek out on outside of it: books, music, and the projects running on my homelab. Some posts will be quick raves, some will be longer write-ups (and probably a rant or two).