Three Decades, One Domain: Celebrating 30 Years of cerkit.com

It started with a newspaper ad on a Sunday afternoon in late 1995.

The offer was simple but mind-blowing for the time: unlimited Internet for $19.99 a month. I took my last $20 bill, hopped in the car, and drove 40 minutes across Atlanta to the provider’s office to sign up. While I was there, I got into a deep technical discussion with the owner. By the time I walked out the door, I didn’t just have an Internet connection—I had a new job as an Internet tech support representative.

That drive changed the trajectory of my life, and it laid the foundation for what would become my digital home for the next thirty years: cerkit.com.

The Early Years and the DasBlog Era

In the beginning, the website wasn’t a blog in the modern sense. It was a digital space dedicated to supporting and promoting “Artists, Musicians, and Writers” in the Atlanta area. Over the years, I experimented with different website configurations and layouts as the web grew up around me.

Then came the blogging boom.

When blogging became the thing to do, I migrated the site over to “DasBlog,” an open-source blogging engine created by Clemens Vasters. I fell in love with the architecture and the engine so much that I joined the volunteer development team, writing code and adding new features to the application. Working on DasBlog introduced me to an incredible community of brilliant people, including Clemens himself. Looking back, it’s amazing to see how many members of that volunteer team went on to have long, incredibly successful careers in the tech industry.

The Public Diary: The Good, the Bad, and the Viral

Over the last 30 years, this website has worn many hats. It has been a promotional tool, a sandbox for testing new technologies, and a deeply honest public diary. It has helped me land some of the best jobs of my career—and it has also given me a front-row seat to how small the digital world can really be.

Back in the early days, I had thousands of daily readers. It was the era where a single link from a blog “celebrity” could instantly overwhelm your server with traffic from a massive wave of new visitors. For me, that viral moment came from a post I wrote titled “Microsoft takes the fun out of programming.”

The irony of that post wasn’t lost on me a few years later.

Because of the technical code samples and insights I shared here, a recruiter at Microsoft reached out and suggested I apply for a position. When I walked into the interviews, I discovered that many of the engineers interviewing me were already regular readers of my blog. The site where I regularly shared my programming journey ended up landing me a job at one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

But having a public platform means your low moments are out there for the world to see, too. The job was extremely high-stress, and during a particularly difficult personal episode, I published an inappropriate, raw blog post first thing in the morning. By the time I checked my phone later, my inbox was flooded with colleagues and readers checking in to see if I was okay.

Through the highest highs and the lowest lows, this blog has been a true mirror of my life and career.

The Next 30 Years

As the web changed, the blog changed too. Today, the site runs on WordPress, but the core mission remains exactly what it was decades ago. It’s a living archive of my passions. If you look through the history here, you’ll find thirty years of me figuring things out out loud: demonstrating how I write code, building hobby electronics, configuring FPGAs, and sharing the electronic and ambient music I compose.

Whether you’ve been reading since the DasBlog days, or you just stumbled across a recent project post, thank you for being a part of this journey.

The last 30 years have been an incredible ride. I have a feeling the next 30 will be even better.