JPL Industrial Arts is an open digital workshop and a laboratory that publishes. It is a place to think, design, and build in public. A platform where personal exploration intersects with public expression, and digital craft is treated with the same care as physical making.
In an era dominated by algorithmic feeds and corporatized content farms, this site is an experiment in a set of questions worth taking seriously: How far can we push the idea of a personal website? How can we reclaim the web as a creative space? How can a site become a tool for thinking, not just a portfolio, not just a static archive?
Writing is only one layer here. The goal is to move beyond expression toward execution: building artifacts that can be used, tested, and refined. Over time, thinking becomes structure. Structure becomes tools. Tools become real-world applications.
Why I Built This
I came of age on the early web, when blogging was an act of curiosity and "personal site" meant something closer to a handmade artifact than a branded funnel. Individuals published weird, wonderful, opinionated spaces: notes, images, designs, lists, fragments. The web felt alive with personality.
Over the years, I kept returning to those impulses, domains bought and abandoned, blogs started and forgotten, tools adopted and discarded. Each time, the web seemed to have shifted underfoot: less open, less human, more mediated. Social platforms that once felt connective became extractive. Content feeds us back to ourselves, optimized for engagement, not understanding. The joy of discovery gave way to the exhaustion of scrolling.
This site is an attempt to step off that wheel.
It embraces the principles of the Indie Web1: own your domain, own your content, publish on your own terms. But I want to go further, experimenting with what a personal site can do as a space for publishing, archiving, connecting, and thinking. Most personal sites stop at expression: essays, notes, collections. What's missing is a layer of execution.
JPL Industrial Arts is an experiment in closing that gap. This is not a portfolio. It is a working system, one where ideas compound, tools evolve, and the work becomes more visible, precise, and useful over time. In a world where output is increasingly easy to generate, the challenge is no longer producing work. It is demonstrating craft, judgment, and taste.
A Call to Action
I believe more of us should be building spaces like this. Personal websites can be small acts of resistance against the corporatization of online life and joyful experiments in creative freedom.
If you're thinking about starting your own, or want to break free of the algorithmic wheel, I'd love to hear from you. I'm happy to share what I'm learning.
