Written by Herman Groenbroek · 12 June 2026
Ten Years of having a Personal Website: from Student to Senior
Today marks 2026, the ten-year anniversary of my personal website you're reading this on. Let us, together, look back on the progress since. It is times like these that I love how convenient it is that much of internet history is kept by organisations like the Internet Archive. Let's get started with the trip down Memory Lane.
2016
I bought this domain and paid for hosting back in 2016: three years into my Bachelor's degree of Artificial Intelligence. In my first year, I was scared of the programming courses I had, because "programming is for smart people, not me". Two years later, I deployed my very own website.
Already for my first website, I wrote all content in English despite being native Dutch, living in The Netherlands, and with little intention to migrate. Interestingly, I promoted myself as "a Dutch photographer and student" – notably photography-first. That's because I wasn't an AI Engineer yet: I was a mere student still. What I could sell, however, was my experience in photography. In case you're wondering, these were my (supposed) frequently-asked questions:
Q: Can I hire you as a photographer?
Most definitely, yes!
Q: I have an old, scratched photograph that means a lot to me. Can you restore it digitally?
Absolutely, I'd be happy to.
Q: I'd like to see myself photoshopped onto the Martini Tower, or whatever. Would you be willing to do this?
Of course, but don't you have a more creative idea?
Q: I don't know much about photography but I really want to learn. Can you teach me?
I love teaching others about photography. Remember, you're only one email away from scheduling a meeting!
Q: Can you sing us a song, you're the piano man?
I'm afraid I'll have to pass. It's for your own good. Trust me.
Q: Show me your photographs / portfolio / prices!
That's not even a question - anyway, at the top of this page you'll find shortcuts that lead you to these sections
Q: Do you do YouTube videos at request?
If you have an idea, let me know. I'm always looking for inspiration.
Say what you will, but my website did have personality back then. Arguably more than it does today :-).
2019
Three years had passed, and I decided to upgrade. I wanted to start fresh & fancy and found just the template for this. It fit some of my photographs perfectly and made it all look a tad more professional. I had started my Master's graduation internship by this point. Time flew! I finally had some noteworthy experiences like visiting a student conference in Japan, participating in a hackathon and an extracurricular course on entrepreneurship. Note that Internet Archive's web extract for this year didn't include static files, that's why the background looks grey, but the next version two years later is visually quite similar, so let's continue swiftly.
2021
I was so proud of this fluffy dog photo I took with colourful bokeh. I figured it'd fit perfectly as the hero image of my website. Looking back years later, I still love it.
In the image where it says "a data scientist", I had a custom bit of javascript that would rotate this quote to other things I was—I never managed to summarize myself into a single role. Some of the other phrases were "a casual musician", "barely a web developer", and "pretty cool 😎".
At the bottom of the page, I started showing one of many random quotes that I'd come across online and enjoyed. Saved by the Internet Archive, for instance:
"If you don't wear the right clothes when you go for a run, you'll look like a criminal."
Anyway.
Let's continue.
2022
After three years of fluffy dog—since I had no idea whose dog this even was—I decided to make the hero image more personal. I used an image of me which I could only ever title "tech nomad at sea".
The quotes changed slightly. My experiences started to include actual data science. And I had been well into AI art by now, before stable diffusion even existed. As for the reach my website had: in consultancy, I occasionally heard people say "how cool that you have a website!". It must've helped land jobs at clients, though I never kept any metrics of how many visitors I actually got. I care about your privacy.
2023
In 2023, I wanted to see how much I could do with (local) LLMs to create my very own website from scratch. The previous websites were simple HTML, CSS and JS served through Apache, hosted on a Raspberry Pi at home for a couple of years. This year, I wanted to dip my toes into Django, although I couldn't get an entire blog up & running with it, so I ended up serving the blog through a separate Docker container running Wordpress. I had lots of trouble making sure the navbar didn't spoil the fact that clicking 'blog' led to a completely different back-end. But it worked!
In the end, the page design became much more minimalistic, on purpose, with a clearer call-to-action to contact me if you were interested. This happened exactly once, by an American company that I completely ignored (so sorry), because I couldn't figure out how to best explain that I was unsure how payments between America and Europe would work in terms of taxes. Perhaps a missed opportunity, although the hourly rate that was mentioned was quite low for Dutch standards (again, so sorry).
The best part in terms of reach? At AIGrunn, I introduced myself to someone, to which they replied: "oh, I know you—I've seen your website!". And the next client's job I took, the Data Scientist who I've come to start an AI Center of Excellence with for the following two years, also mentioned he had seen my website, and even recalled the demo on my Labs page. Isn't that lovely! If only I had kept track of visitors, I'd have known the full extent of page visits.
I still decided against it, for privacy.
2025
I practically only changed my profile photo, from one that was taken at my first job when I still looked like a kid, to a more mature-looking one taken in Spain. The website is practically the same as before, only I did change the Wordpress blog to Django + Wagtail during the Christmas holidays. So much work went into that change, and yet the viewer would be none the wiser. In any case I learned a lot more about Django, and I love that retrying this at a later date finally got me the result that I wanted: it was all (sort of) neatly developed in Django, by this point.
2026
And finally, the 2026 version; the live version at the time of writing this. It may not be the most colourful, or the most personal, but it certainly is the most professional I could design (with the help of Picosa). The initial design for this version was created quickly. It's the attention to detail that cost me many evenings and nights chatting with my Picosa agent to "please restructure the columns, the mobile sidebar, spacing between elements, back-buttons, font-sizes, jinja template variables and whatnot". I even added beautiful pink admin-buttons for article administration to the blog's navbar and mobile sidebar, just for me to see. It's this kind of attention to detail that is so fun to do now that code itself is no longer costly in terms of time.
Since I'm all about transparency, I'll let you know this redesign was fully assisted by Picosa with a locally-running Qwen3.6 35b model. No ChatGPT, no Claude, no Gemini. It's pretty amazing what offline LLMs are capable of nowadays, granted that the developer should know, technically, what they're asking for.
Also, have you noticed how nearly all of my websites have had a hedgehog emoji at the bottom of the page? It's a nod to where it all started: something called the "Hugehog Blog", where I first wrote about some thoughts I deemed worthy to share at the time. But let's quickly forget about that again, shall we? 🦔
Who knows where this domain name will take me in the next ten years. You can be sure I'll make another post like this when the time comes. Feel free to set a reminder already. I know I will.