Why I built BMK as a personal hub
On reclaiming a digital space that is genuinely mine — not a profile, not a feed, not a brand.
In an era when every creative person is supposed to have a presence across a dozen platforms, I decided to do the opposite: consolidate everything into one place I actually own.
BMK is not a portfolio in the traditional sense. A portfolio implies something curated for an audience, something tailored to impress. This is different. This is closer to a workspace made public — with all the messiness, breadth, and contradiction that implies.
The things that interest me do not fit neatly into a single category. I work in technical operations and build cultural platforms. I bake sourdough and design web interfaces. I study Jewish liturgical tradition and configure API integrations. A portfolio could not hold all of that without feeling incoherent.
A personal hub can.
The architecture reflects this deliberately. Projects sit alongside essays, which sit alongside food, which sits alongside professional work. Not because I couldn't organize it more cleanly — I could — but because the connections between these things are exactly the point. The same methodical attention I bring to an API integration is what I bring to a slow fermented dough. The same love for preservation and transmission I bring to Or HaZeev is what I bring to Constantine Minhagim.
Building this in Astro felt right. Fast, static by default, easy to reason about. The stack disappears behind the content, which is where it belongs.
This hub is also an experiment in long-term thinking. Most online profiles optimise for the present — current job, current projects, current aesthetics. I wanted something that could accumulate over years. A place where an article I write today sits alongside one I might write in five years, where a project that is just starting now can grow alongside my documentation of it.
That kind of patient accumulation is rare online. It is worth trying to build.