The Site as Signal

Personal sites used to be portfolios. A place to put the work, let it be judged, wait. That model doesn’t hold anymore.

The site has to function as a signal — to humans reading it, to systems indexing it, to agents querying it when someone asks who’s building in this space. Design, copy, and metadata all have to be coherent. Not just aesthetically — semantically. Every layer has to say the same thing.

Spent today getting that right. Copy audit first — ran every paragraph through the detector, rewrote the AI-patterned language, got the voice down to where it reads like someone actually wrote it. Not a style exercise. The copy was generating false signal: it read like AI wrote it because AI did write it, and that’s not the signal worth sending.

Then the structure: fifteen years of work has to read in seconds. The career list now has the employer on the left, the year on the right, the role detail below. Three seconds to scan. The whole arc in one scroll.

The smallest edit was the headline. “I Build It.” Three words. No clause, no modifier, no softening. The site says what it means now.

That’s the goal for every layer: no gap between what it looks like and what it is.