Dual Identity: Why I Maintain Two Websites

Dual Identity

At first glance, maintaining two personal websites can look a bit excessive.
In practice, it’s a systems decision I’ve arrived at deliberately.

As a web developer, I tend to think in terms of structure and intent. I treat my online presence the same way I treat software architecture. Different surfaces exist for different reasons, and when those reasons get mixed together, clarity usually suffers. When they are separated, each part tends to work better.

This isn’t about personas or performance.
It’s about separation of concerns.

Separation of Concerns, Applied to Identity

In development, we don’t put everything in one file.

We separate:

• stable interfaces from experimental code
• public APIs from internal tooling
• production systems from sandboxes

Applying that same logic to how I present my work online feels natural to me.

I maintain two sites because they solve two different problems.

• michaelmacdonagh.net
  This is my professional surface.
  It’s designed for employers, collaborators, and clients.
  The focus here is clarity, judgement, and trust.

• mechmadhog.com
  This is my experimental space.
  It’s where ideas are tested, language is sharpened, and thinking happens out loud.
  It isn’t optimised for hiring funnels, and it doesn’t need to be.

Trying to force both of these into a single site would mean compromising one or the other. I’d rather let each do its job properly.

Trust and Truth Are Not the Same Thing

A professional site answers a fairly straightforward question:

Can I trust this person to work on important things?

A personal or maker site answers a different one:

How does this person actually think?

Neither is more “real” than the other.
They’re just built for different audiences.

When one site tries to answer both questions at once, something usually gets flattened. Either the professional voice becomes diluted, or the personal voice gets constrained. Keeping them separate allows both to be honest, without having to constantly self-edit.

DIY Means Owning the Whole Stack

I tend to favour:

• static sites
• markdown-first workflows
• version control
• minimal platforms
• long-term ownership

Running two sites fits comfortably within that way of working.

Domains are cheap. Hosting is trivial. Once things are automated, the overhead is minimal.
The cost is negligible. The control isn’t.

If you’re already comfortable designing, deploying, refactoring, and maintaining your own digital infrastructure, then it makes sense to extend that thinking to identity as well. There’s no real reason everything has to live in a single container.

This doesn’t feel like fragmentation to me.
It feels like ownership.

Professional Presence Is an Interface

I don’t see a CV site as a biography.
I see it as an interface.

That doesn’t make it artificial. It just makes it fit for purpose.

In the same way, a personal site isn’t unprofessional. It simply isn’t designed to answer hiring questions. Treating these as distinct surfaces feels less like a conflict and more like a sign of clarity.