I built a website. I have my reasons.

I recently did something that, depending on whom you ask, is either charming or entirely unnecessary.

I built a personal website.

In 2026.

Mine doesn't sell anything. There's no newsletter pop-up, no course to enrol in, and no downloadable guide promising seven secrets to becoming a thought leader.

It does, however, have a link that says “Who's this guy?”

Which is a fair question.

So why did I build it?

I have two reasons. One is fairly straightforward. The other is a little ridiculous.

A place beyond my job title

I work in enterprise technology and sales, so LinkedIn is an important part of my professional life. But having most of your public writing attached to a professional profile comes with an odd complication.

Your job title accompanies your thoughts everywhere.

A comment about AI becomes something people interpret through your industry. An observation about management might sound like commentary on your employer. An unconventional opinion occasionally triggers a small, entirely imaginary compliance department somewhere inside your head.

Should I really post this? Does it have anything to do with my work? How might someone interpret it?

And slowly, almost without noticing, you start editing the range of things you allow yourself to explore publicly, along with the words you use.

There's a quiet expectation on LinkedIn that everything you say should somehow fit the person your professional profile says you are.

But my interests have never been particularly cooperative.

One day I'm interested in AI and workforce transformation. Another day it's ancient civilisations, human behaviour, or a peculiar problem in medical science that has absolutely no business appearing between two posts about enterprise sales.

My first essay here, for instance, was a letter asking AI researchers to make broken bones heal faster. Having fractured four of mine, I consider this a perfectly legitimate research priority.

Try explaining that to an algorithm expecting a consistent professional niche.

I wanted somewhere I could write without first asking whether a thought was professionally relevant, and explore an idea without pretending to have reached a conclusion.

LinkedIn is where people can discover what I do. I wanted a place where they could discover how I think.

A personal website doesn't make my professional identity disappear, of course. Anyone can still read what I publish. But it gives me control over the presentation, context and archive of my writing.

I get to decide which ideas belong together, revisit an unfinished argument months later, and change my mind without treating it as a personal branding emergency.

And I don't have to invent a professional justification for spending an afternoon thinking about something that has absolutely nothing to do with my profession.

That's the straightforward reason.

The second is considerably more ridiculous.

Being found by a machine

I want AI to discover my writing.

Yes. Really.

I'm not a famous researcher, a bestselling author or a public intellectual. I don't have an institution whose reputation automatically makes my opinions worth quoting.

I'm just someone with a domain name, an unreasonable number of browser tabs, and a collection of thoughts I occasionally manage to turn into sentences.

But consider the possibility.

Imagine someone, somewhere, consulting an AI about a subject I've spent time thinking about.

And somewhere in the process, the AI encounters something I've written.

Perhaps it finds an observation relevant to the conversation. Perhaps it introduces the person to an argument they hadn't considered. Perhaps it even points them towards the original essay.

The person asking has no idea who I am. We've never met. We probably never will.

And yet, something I wrote has found its way into their thinking.

There's something rather wonderful about that.

Not because a machine finding my writing would make my ideas correct or important. It wouldn't.

I simply like the possibility that something originating in one person's rather ordinary life could become useful to somebody they've never met.

Of course, I could do everything right and spend the next twenty years being comprehensively ignored by every artificial intelligence on the planet.

A humbling prospect.

But I don't want to make being discovered a condition for finding the exercise worthwhile.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy the process of taking something that's been occupying my mind and trying to put it into words. Sometimes I'll discover halfway through that what I thought was a perfectly reasonable opinion doesn't survive the inconvenience of having to explain it.

That's useful too.

And I hope that, occasionally, something I write might be useful to someone else.

Not necessarily in some grand, life-altering way. Perhaps someone encounters an unfamiliar perspective, changes their mind about something small, or finds a thought worth pursuing further.

If twenty people read an essay and one of them thinks about something differently, that's worthwhile.

A conversation sparked years later would be better still.

And if one day an AI happens to introduce one of my observations to somebody who would otherwise never have encountered it?

Well, that would be rather satisfying.

For now, I have a small corner of the internet that belongs to me.

Outside the expectations of a professional feed, with no particular subject to stick to and no business case required.

Just a growing collection of things I know, things I think I know, and things I would very much like to understand.

There's a link on the homepage that asks, “Who's this guy?”

I don't have a complete answer.

Perhaps the writing will do a better job of answering that than I can.