Hello again, Internet! You might not know me, but you probably already somewhere came across my work or myself if you ended up here. My name is Patrick (born 1975). I am a German, living on Koh Samui in Thailand and I am a web worker. Let me give you a short summary of how we got here and where we go from here 😄

On a sunny October day in the year 1997 I entered the PC-pool of the university of applied science I studied at, logged onto “The Internet™” and never left since. I spent the following 4 years studying the subject of Industrial Management and Engineering, but most of the time I spent on the adolescent web. I created my first “company” (more some form of extra-curricular work group) named Kreaktivo (a mixture of “creative” and “active” in German) that helped companies to get acquainted with and the most out of the new online worlds we were subjected to.

In that time I started my first Blog, “Die Schreibbloggade” (the writer’s block with the back then required weblog reference). After moving to a street called “Fischergrube” (fishers pit) in Luebeck, in the north of Germany a second likewise blog was added. I organised an annual music CD playlist swap and created a website (back then we did not call that communities) that covered and listed new weblog entries of the German blogosphere, called Weblogmonitor and later Blogbot.

Leaving the university in 2001 I set up my own company and promptly run it into the grounds some years later (with having neither business plan or experience being the main reasons). Companies I worked for in that time were Draeger in Lübeck and other but much smaller companies in northern Germany.

Fast forward to 2004 and you find me employed by a company in Berlin, that dabbles in online education and prepeared to open a developer’s branch in Thailand. I found that interesting, applied, got accepted and ended up travelling to Thailand on January 8th of 2005. I did not stay for long with that company, but stayed in Thailand and in 2006 opened my own business David’s Neighbour and work as a freelancer since then here on our beautiful island of Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand.

In 2005 I was mostly working with a small website builder system called Textpattern and “hated” WordPress with all my heart (mostly due to nearly monthly security holes that made life of existing websites quite hard). This of course changed over time and I ended up using (via many years of WordPress work) static website generators.

Then came Corona (Covid-19) (meaningful pause).

On March 18th 2020 Thailand closed all country borders and tourism, tourism operators and companies depending on tourism — my main income source (well, Samui is an island and one of the top 3 tourist spots in Thailand) — instantly died down.

David’s Neighbour is an agency, that depends on word of mouth marketing. All my customers found me by talking to someone who I helped to establish, optimise or increase business. I don’t complain, but I realised in the past two years, that my online footprint is not large enough to “instantly” create new business and income. Which brings us to the NOW and WHY of this weblog. I completely ignored to create some form of online reputation for myself (references, references, references) and lost quite some opportunities in the past two years due to this.

I always had some form of company site or personal blog in the works, but never quite got around to getting to the point of publishing it.

The plan for this blog is to remedy this by finally have some form of online tech-blog with my thoughts and tips about current topics and the things I know.

I actually started back in 2005 to create a tech-blog, where I wanted to post “stuff of interest and things I know”, but I ended up being trapped in a never-ending spiral of optimising and rebuilding. Up to today I have 7 different never-published tech-blogs that died down due to perfectionism, imposter syndrome and technological advancement. Not anymore. I shall kick this blog out there, as imperfectionist as it is.

That’s all. Welcome again. Welcome back. Kind of.

Sidenote: This site is work in progress and not much except the blog entries themself are working properly. Bear with me. I will add a form to notify me about topics you want me to write about, questions on how I built certain parts of the site and anything else you want to get off your chest. I am also aware that the site looks quite chaotic, which is due to me transposing the underlying theme from Bootstrap 4 to Bootstrap 5.