Personal dev websites should not feel corporate

There is a strange expectation around personal websites in tech: they should feel individual, but not too individual. They should have personality, but only inside a frame that still signals clean execution, professional restraint, and broad employability. The result is that many of them end up looking like resumes with better spacing.

I think that is a loss. Not just because it makes the web more interchangeable, but because it removes the part that is actually interesting: the person who made the thing.

A personal website should not pretend to be the digital lobby of a corporation. There are already enough places for that. Enough polished platforms where people present themselves in their most optimized, strategic, and perfectly framed form. Those places can do that job. Your own site does not need to become another surface where you iron yourself flat in order to appear legible to the right audience.

If even the personal website sounds like a job interview, something has gone wrong.

A website should leave a trace, not wear a mask

What I care about in a good personal site is not flawless self-presentation. I care whether it feels like somebody actually built it. Whether choices were made. Whether there is a visible sense of language, movement, color, structure, or taste that did not get sanded down in advance just to avoid offending anyone.

Developers are especially prone to this trap. Maybe because we are trained to make everything explainable, tidy, and professionally defensible. Maybe because recruiting culture and corporate design have spent years teaching us what a "good" surface is supposed to look like. So a personal site slowly turns into a compromise object: technically solid, visually competent, and spiritually mute.

That is a shame, because a personal website is one of the few places where none of that is necessary. Nobody is forcing you into generic claims, neutralized colors, or that specific kind of seriousness that mostly communicates caution. You can actually show how you see things. How you build. How you think. Not as a grand brand message, but in the details.

Perfection is often just conformity in better lighting

Some sites look impressive at first glance because they appear so controlled. Everything aligned. Everything polished. Nothing sticking out. But a lot of that perfection is just conformity with better typography. It does not say, "Here is someone with a point of view." It says, "Here is someone who understands how to satisfy the expectations of the environment."

There is nothing morally wrong with that. It is just not very interesting.

Personal presence does not become credible by looking as professional as possible. It becomes credible when you can feel some friction in it. A preference. A sense of humor. A delight in certain forms. Maybe even a small exaggeration. Something that was built from the perspective of the person, not from the imagined perspective of a recruiter reviewing it.

The joy of making should be visible

What is often missing on the web is not competence. There is plenty of competence. What is missing is visible enjoyment in the act of making.

Developer websites, of all things, should feel more like workshops and less like reception desks. Not messy. Not random. Just alive. You should be able to tell that someone likes trying things. That curiosity is present. That form is not just packaging, but part of the thinking. That an interface is allowed to have a voice instead of merely signaling, "I know the unwritten rules and I am following them."

I think a lot of very good people build the tamest possible version of themselves in the one place where the opposite would be allowed. They write clearly, but without voice. They design carefully, but without risk. They show projects, but not the impulse behind them. Everything is correct. Nothing lingers.

That is especially absurd because software rarely comes from conformity. It comes from decisions. From taste. From the urge to make something a particular way even though it could have been done in a safer, more standard, more expected form. Why should the personal website hide exactly that part?

Not every edge needs to be sanded down

A personal site is allowed to have edges. Not every sentence has to be maximally market-compatible. Not every design choice has to prove that you understand current trends. Not every section needs to justify itself in terms of conversion, positioning, or utility.

Sometimes the most memorable part of a site is exactly the thing that would count as a flaw in a perfectly corporate surface: an unexpected type choice, a line that is a little too direct, a playful motion detail, a layout that feels shaped by conviction more than convention. Those things do not make a website unprofessional. They make it readable as the expression of a person.

And that is what it should be.

Your own site does not owe anyone submission

That is really the point. A personal website does not need to ask for permission. It does not need to constantly anticipate how it might be interpreted by recruiting, by corporate aesthetics, or by generic business expectations. It can survive all of that without orienting itself around it.

If you work in tech, there are already enough places where evaluation, categorization, and self-marketing happen automatically. That is exactly why a personal site matters. It can be more than a proof-of-competence document. It can show how you look at things.

So yes, I think personal dev websites should become a little bolder again. Less polished for the sake of looking polished. Less eager to mimic the language and aesthetics of environments that already dominate everything else. More joy in making. More visible decisions. More of the person behind the code.

In the end, what stays with you is rarely the perfect grid. It is whether anything inside it actually felt alive.