Vedge.org opens with “Please excuse the mess,” which is exactly the correct greeting for a personal homepage containing a GUI toolkit, a machine shop, vacuum tubes, casting experiments, BSD, and a deep-fat fryer.
Julien Nadeau Carriere’s site connects several worlds that modern platforms would normally separate.
There is open-source software: Agar, Edacious, FabBSD, CAD tools, and build systems.
Then there are shop charts for lathe bits, thread depths, cutting fluids, milling cutters, sheet-metal gauges, wire resistance, and torque limits.
Then the gallery starts.
Software engineer meets machine shop
The shop section includes a vacuum-tube base press, hydraulic blanking press, sheet-metal work, ultra-high-vacuum equipment, a glassworking lathe, PCB fabrication, milling machines, aluminum and brass casting, resistance spot welding, a Tektronix curve tracer, vintage computers, and custom-built servers.
It is hard to imagine a better demonstration of why personal websites remain useful.
A platform profile wants to know what category you belong to.
Vedge.org does not care.
The same person can write software, run OpenBSD and FreeBSD systems, build electronics tooling, machine metal, cast brass, photograph the sky, document a BBC Micro, and keep reference tables for screw threads.
The site turns those interests into adjacent directories rather than separate identities.
Its open-source work has also escaped the homepage. Agar, for example, became a cross-platform GUI framework with its own project site. Vedge remains the personal hub where that software sits beside everything else the author actually does.
That context is valuable.
Technology history often gets rewritten as a sequence of projects and products. Personal pages preserve the workshop around the project: the tools, side interests, reference notes, and half-related experiments that explain how someone actually works.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes many sites where useful technical knowledge survives because somebody treated a homepage as external memory.
Vedge.org is practically a filesystem exposed to the public.
The mess is the feature.