The website you are on right now was the first site I created in many years. Back in the old days, I used WordPress already. I also used Joomla, Magento, Typo3, and dinosaurs like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage to work on websites. I remember how I designed a layout myself in Adobe Photoshop and sliced it into little pieces to put it together again and build a website. Do not ask me how many hours all those experiments took me. But is it wrong to spend all those hours if you like what you are doing?

After all these years it was time for another personal web project. I wanted to get back into the game. However, I needed a project that is of value to me. I understood that putting time and effort into it will return in big learnings, but I wanted a little bit more than that. As a once again beginner I was not brave enough to get out to run a project for someone else yet, so it had to be something for myself.

Putting myself out there with my resume seemed right at that time. I anyway planned to undergo major shifts in my “professional career”. Having a resume website handy sounded like a good idea to me.

• The project is small enough and can only be a single page as known as onepager
• The results make me proud and I could actually make use of it
• I need to write text in English which should help me to improve my second language
• I need to overcome some fears concerning to put myself out there

Coming from a conservative and traditional family taught me I should not put personal stuff on the Internet. Going through Business Informatics studies basically taught me the same. Coming from a country like Austria taught me a lot about privacy concerns. No matter if it is in your so-called professional life or personal life – everything that is out there could be used against you. Data protection and privacy is a huge topic in itself. We probably all remember concepts like The right to be forgotten.

It took me many years to understand that it might be (nowadays) even more suspicious if you do not leave any footprints on the World Wide Web. So here I walk. Some things will be forgotten. Some things will be used against me. Some things bring ease. Some things bring success. Some things bring fulfillment. I accept it.

You see, for me personally there were many reasons to start himarkus.com. And there were unnecessary fears to overcome as well. One year later, I am from time to time still working on this website. And still, I am learning from what I am doing here. You probably could not notice, as it was almost never visible on the frontend. I hardly wrote or changed any content. I just constantly tried and tested out different things in the backend, moved the site from one hosting to the next hosting, and had deep discussions with the support team of the theme developer and hosting provider. All of these are many hours of unseen work – just for myself. There is one thing though … I like it.

However, I think it’s about time to transfer himarkus.com from a resume-only page to something more. Within the last year, I took a lot of time for writing. I did not write a book (yet), I did not write blog posts (yet), however, I did a lot of personal journaling about my own life and the life that surrounds me. For some, this might sound like a freakshow but it’s incredibly powerful.

With himarkus.com I myself created something I wanted to see on a professional level. At first, the resume page, followed by writing about professional business topics. Solely in business attire! Solely serious topics! There is a catch though. We change! We constantly change and right now this would not be the real me. I am not in the mood to jump into a suit for some business meetings. I am not in the mood to talk and write about KPIs (key performance indicators) or SLAs (service level agreements). That does not mean that I am not professional. That does not mean that I do not know the ins and outs of those topics. It’s up to us to decide what is professional and what is not.

The new me is professional in many different ways and I really like this journey. During the many months, I spent in Bali, I also learned that business can be done in flip flops at a beach club. Something I would immediately exchange with the daily walk to the fancy office. I could never believe this until I experienced it myself. Just please, just because I mentioned business, beach club, and flip flops in one sentence never mix it up with lazying around the beach with your laptop. Some people try to show this image of themselves and I can tell you it is simply not true.

The bill for the second year is paid, the domain is mine. I think himarkus.com will accompany me on this journey called life for some time. Depending on how it feels the attire and content might change. We will see …