I had a lot of websites about interests of mine but this was the first that was about me and for me. The name comes from the short story of the same name which you can find on this site. It contained at the time my short stories, the start of my blog, my drawings and such. It was in baby PHP with includes and stuff, dreadful shit.

Unfortunately the screenshot is from the older blog-based site, but the actual website was lost in time because it was mostly images and Wayback Machine archived none of them, so nobody will ever see what it looked like.

When I started to master programming and (web)design more I redid my website to reflect it and to have a more up-to-date showcase of my skills for employers. It already had the outline of all the main sections it still has now, with the webcomics and the music having joined the ranks.

It was in teenager PHP with lots of messy shit but less repetition but I was still by not the best programmer just an okay webdesigner.

The name again came from one of my short stories, one I’m most proud of which I had done for a contest but that didn’t end up winning.

The first version I did after I had become an actual programmer, and I did it again to showcase my updated knowledge and design skills. It was made in Laravel which is still my favorite PHP framework.

It was the first to have really cool clean code and the concept of fetching data directly from the third party sources like the Github repositories. It was done manually with nice abstractions through SDKs and such. Sometimes I almost think this was the best stack.

The title doesn’t come from a short story but this time from a landmark Nadja album that had really spoken to me. I actually talk about it in one of my articles about the band. Autopergamene means “self parchment”, in the album it translates as literal writing on the skin, Clive Barker style. It really spoke to me and the concept of website about myself on myself etc so it became a symbol of it and later the name of my company.

Way later in my career as as (now proper) software engineer, I wanted to play with all the cool new Javascript framework that were coming out. Particularly I loved Static Site Generators (which was by no means a new or JS-specific concept) so I ended up picking Gatsby at the time. It allowed me to create a clean, fast and responsive website that centralized data from dozens of third party sources into a GraphQL API that all pages queried to be then rendered fully statically. It was a marvel of performance but also a pain to build and maintain especially as Gatsby got abandonned.

So I rewrote the website in NextJS which was a pain but allowed me to simplify greatly the whole stack. And I decided to continue updating it with more cool things that aren’t just my content, to make it more my digital garden like I had originally envisioned, make it more of a website like we used to do them. Hopefully I’ll manage.

The name comes from my second album Out Through the Winter Throat , it’s an album that touches a lot about war and cataclysm, and its main title comes from humanity on the album being kicked out through the (nuclear) winter’s throat. Not disappeared, but swallowed in it. This is likely the most political version of my website, and it’s still miles away from how much I would want it to. But this image of us all gradually vanishing in our own doom stuck with me as I rewrote my website at a time where I myself was being swallowed by life.