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The idea of a personal website is not revolutionary.

I built this one to encapsulate the things that interest me, be it the projects I work on or the things I keep coming back to. The idea, though, was not mine. I was at a coworking café with a good friend who brought it up. We bounced some ideas back and forth. I bought the domain almost immediately.

Weeks later, I stopped to wonder: how many of my choices can be traced back to a specific moment? A conversation, a link someone sent?

As a kid, I loved Algerian food (even more so now). Most evenings my family would settle in the living room with mint tea and traditional sweets. That was just what you did. I’d ask for tea with crystallized sugar sticks and eat enough sweets to guarantee a crash an hour later. Cigares aux amandes, makroudh, kalb el louz, baklawa, it really didn’t matter. I was watching the adults and mirroring them, and probably going a bit overboard with the food. But at some point, unconsciously the imitation stopped being imitation.

Most people know of the fact the influences around them to a certain degree, but awareness doesn’t necessarily negate that sponge effect. We evolve and have constant feedback loops around us that obfuscate the inputs. We derive from our family as children, then friends get thrown in the mix, culture too, and eventually, algorithms. That mirroring becomes harder to quantify as our feeds can be varied in content, yet conceptually similar.

Virgil Abloh built his career off the acknowledgement of influence (or blatant plagiarism depending on your perspective). His 3% rule: change something by just 3% and you’ve recontextualized it enough to call it new. Even though he was specifically talking about fashion, the same logic applies to how we think. Every idea you hold is a rearrangement of something you absorbed from somewhere else.

I built this website because a friend suggested it. I bought the domain because it felt right in the moment. I have no idea how much of what’s on it is actually mine.