Sophie Koonin

Sophie is the web engineering lead at Monzo Bank in London, responsible for the web platform across the organisation and working on internal tooling that powers Monzo’s award-winning customer service. Building websites since the age of 10, she’s passionate about creating inclusive, accessible and fun websites that people love. Sophie writes about tech & mental health at localghost.dev, builds intentionally useless web apps, and makes music.

This Website Is under Construction – a Love Letter to the Personal Website

Remember Geocities? The unbridled creativity and questionable colour schemes of a bygone era. There was a time when websites existed as reflections of your personality or a shrine to your favourite band rather than carbon copies of a Facebook page or Twitter feed. Content wasn’t algorithmically curated, but shared through links pages and webrings.

With modern browsers, we have at our fingertips so many powerful APIs and tools to build the most incredible, beautiful and wonderfully pointless websites that have ever existed, in ways that are accessible and performant like never before. So why aren’t we? Why do all the websites today look the same?

This is a manifesto for building something just for the fun of it, and a rallying cry to tell your story on a platform that’s entirely yours.