Today's changes were less about new features and more about the site finally telling my story accurately — plus a handful of small details that add up.
A face, at last
The About page used to make a point of it: no stock photos, no illustrations, just the logo used twice. That was true until today. I dug up a portrait and added it — round, sitting right next to the headline in the hero, the same spot on every page that has a hero: About, the Blog index, every individual post, and Contact.
That meant updating the one paragraph on the site that bragged about using "only one image." It now explains the exception: a page about me should probably show my face, so that's the second image, right up top.
A day later I swapped in a better photo and sized it 50% larger — same round shape, same position, just more presence in the hero.
The cache bug
Here's the part worth writing down. The portrait's circular shape comes from CSS, and I edited styles.css to add it — but every page loads that file as styles.css?v=21, a version number this site bumps deliberately whenever the stylesheet changes, specifically so browsers fetch a fresh copy instead of reusing a cached one. I forgot to bump it.
The result: my own browser, which had visited the site before, kept serving its cached copy of the old CSS — the one without the round-image rule. Locally, on a server that had never cached anything, the portrait looked exactly right: round, properly sized. On the live site, the same HTML and the same (already-updated) CSS file rendered as a plain square, because the browser never asked the server for the new version in the first place.
Once I traced it back to the version number, the fix was mechanical: bump ?v= on every page that links to styles.css (and, a few edits later, on script.js and translations.js too, once I'd been burned once and started checking), then redeploy. Straightforward once you know to look for it — the annoying kind of bug, where the code was already correct and the only thing wrong was a number nobody thought to change.
The timeline gets a rewrite
The About page's "Experience" timeline was always an approximation — good-faith guesses at dates and titles, standing in until I could hand over the real thing. Today I did, from an actual CV in German, and rebuilt the section entry by entry:
- The vague "Owner, Roehn Metallbau" era is gone, replaced by what actually happened: a technician role at my family's metalworking business, planning and overseeing production of windows, doors, façades, and conservatories by CAD.
- A parallel job I'd never mentioned made the cut — building and selling PCs on an hourly basis for a company called CompuKom, including some of the very first websites I ever built for a client. That's arguably the real origin of the freelance career that's still listed right above it.
- The single "Process Engineer" and "Machine Operator" entries split into the three distinct roles they actually were: machine fitter and operator, then shift leader, then project engineer — each with its own multi-year stretch at the automotive supplier's plant in Bockenau.
- The China chapter — build-up support followed by a promotion to production manager — collapsed from two entries into one, matching how the CV actually describes it.
- And the timeline now reaches all the way back to 1990: a metalworking apprenticeship, a technical secondary school, compulsory military service, and five semesters of steel-and-metal-construction studies I left without finishing — the whole run-up to the manufacturing career, not just the career itself.
Sixteen entries now, up from twelve, translated into English, German, and Chinese like everything else on the site. The two real names from that era of the CV — the company later known by two different names — stay anonymized as "automotive supplier," same as before.
One more small fix: the "40+ Websites, Self-Taught" entry had drifted to the very bottom of the list, after the education entries that actually came earlier in time. Moved it back up where 1997–2003 belongs.
And the small stuff
- The philosophy paragraph, the "fun fact," and the Mac Mini update on the About page now each sit inside their own subtly bordered box, instead of floating as plain paragraphs — using the same neutral card background already used elsewhere on the site, so it reads as part of the existing design system rather than a new one.
- There's a flag next to the language switcher now — 🇬🇧, 🇩🇪, or 🇨🇳 depending on what's selected — that updates the moment you pick a different language and persists with your saved preference on the next visit.
- Added roughly 15mm of breathing room above "Core strengths" on the About page, right below the little browser mockup — it was sitting a bit too close for comfort.
Small changes, but the kind that make a page feel finished rather than just correct.