Why this site runs on EmDash

For a long time I treated a personal site as something I would get to later. There was always a client project, a product idea, or one more tool to try. Then I noticed the quiet cost of that. If I only write inside other people's products, I never leave a room that is mine.

So I wanted kegren.com to be simple on the surface and honest under the hood. A place for a few words about who I am, the work I am proud of, and notes when I have something worth saying. Not a second career in CMS maintenance.

What I did not want was the usual split. A pretty static site for the portfolio, then a bolted-on blog with its own auth, database, and deploy story. That setup always starts fine and ends with me avoiding the admin.

EmDash clicked because it meets me where I already like to work. Astro on the front. Cloudflare for hosting. An admin that feels calm enough that I might actually open it on a Tuesday night and publish something. One system for pages, projects, and posts, instead of three half-finished ones.

I also care about tools I can shape. I contributed Swedish localization to EmDash, and shipping that felt good in a small, concrete way. Using the same project for my own site is not brand loyalty. It is curiosity that turned into trust.

This first post is mostly a handshake. Hello from Västerås. If you landed here from a job post, GitHub, or something I built, I am glad you stopped by. More writing will come when I have something useful, not just something to fill the feed.