Workshop Diary, a short note on how tools really come to be.

I built myself a website, kallehakala.fi, my own project, on my own time. And since you rarely get to do this in peace, I did it properly: I treated a small homepage with the same questions I bring to any system. What can go wrong, who can get in, where does the data live, and how do I recover if something breaks.

Continuity: one truth, backups elsewhere

The live site is the only truth, not ten versions drifting apart. The backup lives genuinely somewhere other than the same server: if that one server disappears, the copy doesn’t go with it. And every change is deliberate, so I can roll back. This is business continuity at one-person scale, the same questions as at a bigger one.

Security and privacy from the start

The easiest data protection is the data you don’t collect. No comment fields, no user accounts, no forms. You reach me directly by email or messaging app. No tracking cookies, no profiling. Location data (EXIF) is stripped from images before publishing. What isn’t collected can’t leak. There’s no register to protect, because there is no register.

What isn’t collected can’t leak. The simplest data protection is the data that doesn’t exist.

The site isn’t just a business card. It’s a small sample of how I approach any system: build the discipline in from the start, and don’t collect what you don’t need. If I do this for my own little site, you can guess how I do it when something’s actually at stake.

Next: I built this same site with AI, and kept my hands on the wheel.