The „Project Graveyard” gets a New Monument

They say the cobbler's children have no shoes. In the IT world, things are often no different: we spend all day planning complex architectures, optimizing databases, or conducting code reviews for others, while our own digital presence gathers dust somewhere between an outdated "Under Construction" page from 2018 and an abandoned GitHub profile.

As an instructor for IT retraining programs, I stand daily in front of people who want to turn their lives around. I teach them how to understand systems, how to solve problems, and how to find a professional home in a world full of zeros and ones. But recently I realized: I had no active side project. And for someone who sees IT not just as a job but as a passion, standing still is a pretty uncomfortable feeling.

Here is the story of why I decided to dig the next grave in my "Project Graveyard", or maybe this time lay a foundation for eternity.

The Anatomy of My Project Graveyard

Before we talk about what this new website is, we need to talk about what it is not. It is not my first. If I am honest, it is probably closer to number 15 or 20.

My digital attic is full of corpses:

• The portfolio page from 2015 (still with way too much jQuery).
• The blog about Linux server hardening that has exactly two articles.
• The "Revolutionary" task management tool that got stuck at the database modeling stage.
• Three separate attempts to write my own CMS, only to end up back with static generators anyway.

Why am I telling you this? Because this project graveyard is not a sign of failure. In IT, an abandoned project is often more valuable than a completed tutorial. You learn through failure, through refactoring, and even through the final "rm -rf". But this time the motivation was different. I did not just want to play around; I wanted to create value that goes beyond the pure learning effect.

Visibility in a World Full of Noise

As an instructor, I constantly preach the importance of personal branding to my retrainees. In an industry that is desperately searching for skilled workers, but at the same time maintains high standards for quality, a CV as a PDF is often no longer enough.

Who are you on the web? What is your "proof of work"?

By building this website, I am practising what I preach. I want to be visible, not just as a name on a freelance contract, but as an expert with opinions, style, and a clear methodology. Visibility means:

• Authenticity: You can see how I structure code and how I explain complex topics.
• Reference point: When a potential partner or a curious student wants to know how I think, they will find the answer here.
• Archiving: Knowledge that I do not write down gets lost in the noise of everyday life.

The Website as an "Extended Classroom"

The main reason for this specific project, however, is my day-to-day life in IT retraining. Retrainees are a special target group: they bring life experience, often have little time, and must cover an enormous amount of material in record time.

I frequently notice in class that standard textbooks are either too abstract or too superficial. I need content that is tailored precisely to my teaching approach.

Knowledge at the Push of a Button

Instead of drawing the same explanation of how DNS works or the MVC pattern on the whiteboard every single time, I want to be able to point to my own interactive articles. The website serves as a digital depot for:

• Cheat Sheets: Compact summaries for Linux commands or SQL queries.
• Best Practices: "How do I set up a Git structure without losing my mind?"
• Troubleshooting: A collection of the most common pitfalls I encounter in retraining projects.

When a student asks: "Do you have any materials on that?", I do not want to point them to an 800-page textbook, but instead say: "Check my site. I built an interactive example for exactly that." That raises the quality of my teaching enormously.

Overcoming the "Side-Project Drought"

Every IT professional knows the feeling: you are buried in your day job, the projects are large, slow-moving, and often plagued by legacy code. You lose touch with the "fresh" stack. Side projects are the gym for the mind.

Without a side project, you rust. You forget what it feels like to build a project from git init. You lose the habit of making architectural decisions, because in your main job everything is usually already predetermined. This website was my cure against mental inertia. I had to decide:

• Which framework do I use? (Next.js? Astro? Or go fully purist?)
• How do I host the whole thing in an automated way? (CI/CD pipelines are mandatory even for small sites!)
• How do I handle accessibility and performance?

This project is my test lab. Everything I try out here, whether a new CSS approach or an edge function, flows directly back into my teaching as hands-on experience.

The "Instructor's Dilemma": Theory vs. Practice

There is a nasty saying: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I hate that saying.

Good teaching in IT is only possible if you are willing to get your hands dirty yourself. Anyone who only quotes from books loses the respect of their students the moment the first error message appears that is not in the script. Through my website, I demonstrate that I actually master the tools I teach. I am not just the person who explains the theory of HTTP status codes. I am also the person who has the server configuration behind it under control.

What to Expect Here (And What Not to)

This is not a glossy magazine. It is a living document. I plan to establish three pillars here:

• Deep Dives for Retrainees: Articles that pick up where the standard curricula leave off. Practical, honest, and sometimes with a pinch of humour about the quirks of technology.
• Thoughts on IT Didactics: How do people actually learn to program today? Is ChatGPT enough? (Spoiler: No, but it helps).
• Technical Experiments: Documentation of my little "lab tests".

What you will not find here: perfectionism. That was the reason my project graveyard grew so large. The motto is: "Better done than perfect." If an article is only 80% finished but helps someone understand Docker containers, it goes online.

Conclusion: A New Home

So why did I build this website? Because as an instructor I have a responsibility to stay on the pulse of the times. Because I want to be a role model for my students when it comes to digital self-marketing. And above all, because I have the urge to create things rather than merely consume them.

Maybe this site will one day become another headstone in my project graveyard. But until then it will be a toolbox, for me, for my retrainees, and perhaps for you too.

Welcome to my digital living room. The coffee is black, the code is (mostly) clean, and curiosity is the engine behind everything that happens here.

A small piece of advice for my students and fellow readers

Start building. It does not matter if a thousand other blogs already exist. It does not matter if you think you have nothing new to say. Your perspective, your way of explaining a problem, is unique. And in the worst case? You will simply have a new, beautiful grave in your own project graveyard. You learn something new at every funeral.