Personal website of Jürgen Šuvalov - a product person and technologist from Tallinn, Estonia.https://jyrkki.eu/https://jyrkki.eu/posts/hello-world/https://jyrkki.eu/posts/hello-world/Hi! I am Jürgen and I have a blog now. Here's the why and the how.Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:00:00 GMT<img src="https://jyrkki.eu/_astro/hello-world.DR5zTe7q.png" alt="Jürgen with messy hear, grinning wide. There's a speech bubble next to his face that says "Hello World!". The background is blurred but we can see it's a bar." width="2840" height="1491" /><p>Hello Internet, Hello Web, Hello Friends. Did you know that the word “hello” was popularized as a greeting by Thomas Edison for telephone usage, even though the inventor of the telephone, Alexader Graham Bell, preferred “ahoy”? Anyway…</p> <h2 id="the-dread">The Dread</h2> <p>I have been feeling down about the state of the web for a while. I grew up with the web. I remember the wonderful chaos in the dot-com bubble era. And at first, the so called “Web 2.0” seemed like an improvement. And in a lot of ways it was. But then the great <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification">enshittification</a> happened. Now, we are experiencing the great sloppification. And the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory">Dead Internet Theory</a> seems more and more real.</p> <h2 id="the-hope">The Hope</h2> <p>During the last year or so, I’ve been finding a lot of joy in rediscovering the weird web. I think it started when I began going through the catalogue of <a href="https://shoptalkshow.com/">ShopTalk Show</a> episodes and following the guests they had on. I discovered that RSS and personal websites are still alive and kicking. That coincided with me trying to onboard to Bluesky and Mastodon, where I have found a lot of thoughtful and original people to follow. Both on the decentralized social media sites as well as via RSS. And most of them preach a similar gospel - just build websites. This beautiful <a href="https://henry.codes/writing/a-website-to-destroy-all-websites/">essay</a> by Henry Desroches hit me especially hard. And even though it’ll take a little while for me to design a website as beautiful and weird as his, I figured having a website to chuck words at is a decent start.</p> <h2 id="the-effort">The Effort</h2> <p>So this is my little corner of the web. I built it with Astro. More details are available in <a href="https://jyrkki.eu/colophon">the colophon</a>. I realize that it’s not feasible for everyone to custom build a website. But there are tools out there that make it pretty simple. And if not a website - maybe try joining the fediverse, whether that’s on ActivityPub (Mastodon) or atproto (Bluesky) and nudging others into it as well.</p> <h2 id="the-future">The Future</h2> <p>For my site, I don’t really have any specific plans. I’ll write about what I feel like. Mostly that’ll be tech, music and general musings. And despite the grim state of things politically, economically and technologically, I am trying to stay optimistic about the future. And I think there are a lot of reasons to be, you just might have to search for them a little.</p>