About

Hi, my name is Phil Suh, and this is my personal website.

filsa.net

My first website was lovingly handcrafted and uploaded to a long-since dead Global Online account based in Tokyo, Japan, back in 1994. Thats right, it looked best in Netscape 1.0.

In 1997 I registered filsa.net, a new home for my little webpage. Unfortunately, soon after, I went to work building websites, and spent most of the next decade building Other People’s Websites. I spent my working hours building complex systems and clever website automation techniques, and learning far too much about Content Management Systems.

filsa.net suffered in neglect, collecting cobwebs and dreaming of the good old Netscape 3 days.  It received an occasional update every now and then when a resume would be posted or a conference would be attended. But otherwise it was dusty and lifeless.

I dreamed of building a really cool content management system that would do everything I wanted on a website. I just could never get around to building it in my spare time. Stymied by my immense ambitions and high standards, no system I designed could be good enough. I procrastinated. And it turned out, in my copious spare time, I found other thing to do instead: having a social life, running, travelling, hanging out in bookstores.

That wasn’t so bad, actually. But my website languished.

One day, I fell down a set of concrete stairs in the New York subway, and hit my head. When I came too, I had missed my train–but I was a changed man.

I came to terms with being a slacker. I moved my site off of my rusty and neglected Linux server in the closet, and onto a hosting server. They had a one-click install of Wordpress. That’s all it took.

Wordpress is a system that I used to sneer at because it was built on PHP, and I was too much of a snob. Well, not anymore–not after that fateful pratfall on the stairs running to catch the Brooklyn-bound F train.

So here we are. Ten years of filsa.net, and a fresh start. It feels pretty good. Except for the big lump on my head, of course. Pretty good.

Thanks for joining me.