About Me

Hi, I'm Nikola Mihaylov. Thanks for visiting these parts!

Originating from Bulgaria and currently living in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, I'm a 23 years old guy with an interest in music and technology, as well as casual photography. Currently aiming to make a living as a systems administrator after finishing an Umschulung ("re-training") here in Germany.

Site Motivation

My motivation for this site is fairly simple - I believe the internet in its current state is a victim of uneccesary bloat, centralization and over-reliance on Big Tech companies. Having a personal hand-crafted site is far more interesting than forwarding others to your template page on a Big Tech platform.

Over the past few years I have become increasingly worried about the trajectory of where our relationship with technology and self-expression online has been heading towards - what once was the Wild West with every netizen carving their own webspace by painstakingly crafting their own sites in order to express themselves to the fullest extent that these technologies once allowed us to has now transformed into a dystopian economy of walled gardens and centralization of all human interaction online to a few Big Tech platforms that house billions of users all at once. Massive economies have been built around data collection and user retention that keep people confined to these respective platforms, and worse yet, remain completely apathetic towards this reality.

What I've also come to realize is how easy it is to break this mold as an individual and be infatuated with the endless curiousity and drive to keep learning and trying things out. Today self-hosting has never been easier and there are tons of resources to help you learn how to make a personal site such as this. For all the ills that the current internet has, it would be unwise to deny the absolute breadth of knowledge and inspiration it can provide (that is, if you can still find authentic sources that aren't AI regurgitated slop). Ultimately my goal is to house something that may inspire you in some way to break the mold of apathy and conformity and be another representative of digital independence and freedom. A personal site that has been hand-crafted is far more meaningful than a customized Facebook wall, no matter how half-assed it may turn out.

As alluded to earlier, this site is fully self-hosted and maintained by yours truly. There are no proprietary dependencies, no JavaScript, no analytics, no cookies, no ads and real downtime based on human-error and mishaps. The infrastructure is a plain static HTML website running in Nginx and managed by a local Forgejo Git repository, loaded inside a Debian virtual machine on a Proxmox host housed inside a tiny ThinkCentre with a DynDNS server to a provider. If I can pull this off, so can you.