Nothing this week felt outstanding. I shipped work at my day job. I kept polishing a desktop app. And I finally did the split I had been putting off.
My portfolio used to live on my company domain. The blog too. One site tried to be both "Chris Horn, engineer" and "Hornx Engineering, the company I bill through."
That gets messy fast when you are job-searching and contracting at the same time.
What was wrong with one domain
A company site should answer: who pays the invoice, what the entity is, how to hire the company. A personal site should answer: who I am, what I have shipped, how to reach me as a person.
When both live on the same domain, every visitor has to guess which one you meant. Recruiters open a company URL and get a resume. Clients open the same URL looking for commercial pages and get a blog. You keep editing one homepage to serve two jobs, and it serves neither.
I also did not want my writing locked under a company brand I might outgrow, rename, or stop using. Posts are about how I work. They should travel with my name.
What I did
I moved the portfolio and the blog to a personal domain: chrishorn.dev. New stack while I was there. TanStack Start instead of Next.js. Same content, different host, cleaner ownership.
The company domain keeps the company. Commercial pages, locales, brand assets. Old blog URLs redirect so nothing I already published dies in someone else's tab.
I am not going to pretend the company site is finished as a product site. The important part landed: personal work and company work no longer fight over one homepage.
Why this week, not later
I keep waiting for a week that feels worth writing about. Last week that was the accounting app and the hour-logging loop. This week was quieter. Shipping. Splitting domains. No clever agent story.
That is still a real week. If I only write when the work is dramatic, the blog becomes a highlight reel, and the highlight reel is a lie about how most weeks look.
The split also has a practical reason. I am looking for work. I want a URL that is my name. Not a company I founded to invoice. Not a client. Not a stack I happened to use in 2024.
chrishorn.dev is that. hornxengineering.dev can be the company. They can link to each other. They should not be the same site anymore.
What I am not claiming
I am not claiming a rebrand case study. I am not claiming TanStack Start is better than Next for everyone. I am not claiming you need two domains the moment you open an SRL.
I am claiming this: if one domain is doing two jobs, and one of those jobs is "hire me as a person," give the person their own domain. Do it before the blog, the SEO, and the muscle memory make the move expensive.
I did it this week. It was overdue.