A colleague of mine gave me a present recently. It didn't come in a box. It doesn't sit on a shelf. It was a domain name — this one. My own name, with a .com at the end of it.
If you have never been an immigrant, that might sound like a small thing. Let me tell you why it isn't.
When you leave your country, you leave almost everything behind. The house, the street, the language on the shop signs, the people who knew you before you were anyone. What you carry across the border fits in a suitcase — and in a name. Your name is the one possession no officer can stamp, no form can shrink, no distance can dilute. It gets mispronounced in new accents and misspelled on new documents, but it is still yours. It is the thread that connects who you were to who you are becoming.
So when a colleague quietly registered shakilahmad.com and handed it to me, they gave me something better than an object. They gave me an address for my name. A small, permanent place on the internet that says: he is here, and this is his.
I have built a lot of websites — citizenship test apps, study tools, guides for newcomers — always for others, always under other names. It never occurred to me to build one for myself. That is the funny thing about builders: the shoemaker's children go barefoot, and the web developer's own name points to a parking page.
Not anymore. This site is my thank-you note, written in the only language I write fluently: HTML and CSS, by hand, no frameworks, no trackers, light enough to load on a bad connection in a far-away place — because I remember what it is like to be in a far-away place with a bad connection, looking for information that might change your life.
Here is my promise for this little corner of the sky: I will keep it honest, I will keep it fast, and every so often I will write something here — about building things alone, about starting over, about the strange and wonderful business of being from two places at once.
To my colleague: thank you, friend. You gave me my name back in a form I never thought to claim. I intend to be worthy of the gift.
— Shakil