Sixteen Projects and One Domain

By Georg Malahov

I have big plans for April, and yesterday, going through a year and a half of my voice notes, I was surprised: I've accumulated sixteen projects. The day job, client websites, Call Copilot — an extension that transcribes calls — a subtitle editor, a dictation app, the voice journal I pulled those notes out of in the first place. Without the notes I would have had nothing to work with: I'd sit down to remember — and it would feel like I'd done nothing, with nothing to tell. Even though it's all there. Just scattered: some of it in repositories, some on subdomains, and some living only in my memory.

Meanwhile my own domain is a redirect to LinkedIn. I set it up quickly at some point: since I keep LinkedIn updated anyway, let it be my one storefront — everything in one place, nothing to maintain. That doesn't work. And it looks unserious: someone who plans to live off his own products, showing a redirect to a profile on someone else's platform instead of a site. Time to get a real blog and a real site of my own.

The plan is this: one platform for my own and all the other projects. One domain, with the products on it — not on subdomains, but in categories. Plus a blog. The goal is to start building an audience and SEO on my own site, to leave a consistent trail on the internet. So that, all else being equal, I'm more competitive — whether I end up looking for contract work or selling my own products.

Of all the personal projects, the blog and the hub have now moved to the top, because they're the connective tissue between everything else. The foundation. As soon as it's ready, I start moving things in: first Call Copilot, then the subtitles, then dictation. The client work is worth telling about too — every job has a story, a process, and takeaways.

My bet is this: every undertaking should end either as a blog post, or as a repository, or as a product. It should find closure and stay part of my story instead of simply ending and disappearing. My own shelves on the internet, with everything laid out on them. The shelf and the label came up back in the autumn, on the launch course — it was about one product then, and now it turns out to be about all of them at once.

In terms of volume this isn't a month of work — more like the whole year. By the end of the year the site should work end to end: Datenschutz — the data-protection texts German rules require — sign-in, payments, a newsletter. I want my own visit statistics, on my own server: no sneaky marketing pixels, just watching it grow.

There's a separate item that costs more than the technical ones: becoming public. I've run more than once into being embarrassed to talk about my projects — at previous jobs I hid them from colleagues. Right now I'm the only developer at the company, and I have no colleagues doing the same kind of work. Side projects are my way to grow, to build competence, and not to lose myself professionally. Once I publish all of this, the amount of work that went into it will be visible. Let it be visible.

I don't need to talk myself into it anymore — I've made up my mind. Over the next month or two I finish building the hub and put the projects out there. By the end of the year this domain should hold a living site with readers, not a redirect to LinkedIn.