I have spent a fair amount of time building this personal website, but the final result contains orders of magnitude more labour than what I have put into it.

This is a letter of thanks to the open-source community and all of the people and companies that have been so generous as to provide their work for free, to be reused and remixed as others see fit. When I started to think about it, I was overwhelmed by how much relies on this generosity.

What You Can See

I designed this website “from the ground up”. This meant paying careful attention to placement, aesthetics, information density and the user-interaction. However, reflecting on it now, web design today is predominantly about curating the incredible assets and software libraries that are freely available, tailoring the experience I would like my visitors to have. In other words: it is more like interior design than sculpting.

All of the feature images are taken from Unsplash, a website where talented photographers post their work to be used anywhere for free, even for commercial purposes. It is even more incredible that the browsing experience and quality of the work are substantially higher than on most paid services.

Alexander Sinn

Boris Baldinger

Mateo Avila Chinchilla

Davisco

The font families I use here are also open-source and can be used freely for any purpose. Designing good fonts is takes great skill and a lot of time, especially when they are as feature-complete as these. For the body, I use IBM Plex and for headings and titles a more “technical” Jetbrains Mono.

Most modern digital interfaces also make extensive use of icons and pictograms. These are far more information-dense and their use is often consistent across interfaces, making them powerful signalling tools for user interactions. Additionally, striking a good balance between text and icons also allows the designer to reduce the clutter, maintain information density and assign a visual weight to elements. The main drawback to icons and pictograms is that they require orders of magnitude more effort than writing text. That is why I am so grateful to the people and organisations that give access to their rich libraries of icons. This site makes extensive use of IBM’s Icon Library.

After having spent 6 years designing vehicle components and modelling these in 3D, I still enjoy having a go at it in my spare time. It is a creative process that is not so different from programming. There is a procedural flow and craftmanship to it. For a long time, powerful, professional-level tools in 3D modelling were simply out of reach for hobbyists. They command tens of thousands of dollars each year in licence fees.

Then, along came Blender, a fully-featured mesh modelling, rendering, animation, sculpting, video editing and even simulation tool. Today it is even used regularly in the production of blockbuster movies. Admittedly, it does not fulfil the same demands placed on parametric modelling tools like CATIA, but it is far more enjoyable to use and I am already much more productive with it despite only having used it for a fraction of the time. Most of the 3D renders that you see on this site were produced in Blender.

These assets are crucial to the look and feel of this website and yet we have barely scratched the surface at this point…

What You Can’t See

The modern internet runs on the charity of some of the most intelligent people in the world. The biggest single contribution in this respect is by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Linux is the operating system that powers the server on which this site is hosted, it is also running on a host of telecommunication systems that bring this content to you.

If you are reading this on an Android phone or Chromebook, your operating system was derived from Linux. These operating systems are also open-source, which means that others can and do modify and tailor these to their needs. The core of the browser you read this on is almost guaranteed to be open-source too. That is the beauty of the open-source movement: work aggregates and becomes more valuable.

Linus did not stop there however, he was dismayed with the state of software version control in the early 2000s and decided to build his own. In 2005 he then released Git and open-source version management tool that has now become the de-facto standard in the software development industry. At face value, a good version control system seems like a helpful utility, but hardly critical. Yet, when you have a closer look, it becomes apparent that it is an indispensable tool if you want to build complex software systems and it is especially important when you collaborate with others. I version all of my software projects in Git.

This site was built with Hugo, a framework to easily build static websites. A simplistic description would be that it takes markdown files (easy to write text files) and compiles them into valid HTML sites that can be served on the internet.

Styling this site was made much easier and consistent by using TailwindCSS. This, in turn, relies on a host of other open-source libraries and frameworks to work, such as node.js, webpack and post-css.

Hugo is written in Go, a programming language that was open-sourced by Google. Most successful programming languages are open-source today and the same goes for databases, protocols, web-servers and other core systems. It is truly incredible when we take a step back and acknowledge it for a minute.

That Adds up to a Lot of Work

This list of tools and assets is meant to be exhaustive enough to underline my point, but I cannot pretend that this list is even close to exhaustive. Nobody really understands to what extent they are relying on the generosity of others. (It also becomes a bit of a rabbit hole: do we include Newton and Archimedes?)

We should also not forget that usually, this work is not just shared once. It requires constant maintenance and attention to ensure that it fulfils the requirements of the people that use it for free!

There is a virtuous cycle that forms when so many people make their work freely available and allow others to build on top of it. This is what has allowed me to create a much more polished presence on the web. Remember the days before there were so many resources available…