Domain owner!

Websites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that

- Paul Cookson

Even though I am just a student without any company of my own (and thus no employees), I must say that I agree with Paul. And that’s just because of the power websites have and how they’ve transformed our society. To be fair, though, now in the so-called Web 4.0 we have a completely different way of how the web works and especially people interact differently with the internet.

I still believe even in the era of social media and mobile apps, websites are still valuable for multple reasons, but in my opinion the two most important are the following:

1. The whole industry is moving towards increasing compatibility as much as possible and websites are a viable solutions. Many developers have switched from OS specific langauges (Mainly Objective-c/Swift for Apple and Java/Kotlin for Android) towards web-dev languages. This allows for greater portability and makes the whole development process easier, since a mobile app would only need to be a client of said website (or, in this case, web-app) instead of being a fully fledged app. But, I must admit, mobile development isn’t something that interests me that much, I am way more into Data Science and Machine Learning, so I tend not to go deep into mobile dev (sadly).
2. If you are a professional, or an aspiring one as in my case, having a website is a very small investment (my domain costs 12€) which will immediately give any employer or colleague a better first impression. Let’s be honest - first impressions are very important and sometimes a good first impression is all you need for a job. Having your own domain comes with the possibility of setting your own email address, such as my newly created one - mail@alessandrochiarelli.com (even though in my particular case, this is only an alias of my gmail address).

I decided to set up my website as a personal project and originally I entended to use my Raspberry Pi as a server. Now, my server works and I use it to play around and make my experiments, but for security reasons, I decided to use Github and Netlify as both hosting and deploying method. As I said before, I registered my domain with Google domains. The process I followed was a very simple one and I would be glad to help any of you if needed, but just looking at the documentation you will find everything straightforward.

This website will serve as an online CV, my about me page is fairly exhaustive and outlines all you need to know about me. I decided to use this as a blog to keep track of my progress and ideas as I continue on my journey in becoming an engineer. I am updating all of my social media accounts to point to this website and I am happy to have taken such a step towards becoming a fully-fledged professional!

Thank you for having read this post,

Alessandro Chiarelli