🏁 Behind the Barriers: What I Learned Volunteering at the F1 Miami Grand Prix

I’ve always been a motorsports enthusiast. I love driving on track myself, but it’s also a privilege to witness the pros push the absolute limits. Today marks the fourth annual Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix, and while I’m watching it from home this time around, I can’t help but think back to when I had the opportunity to be right there, on the front lines.

This idea first came about when my niece asked me how she could play Roblox on her school Chromebook since that’s the only laptop she had. That was like three years ago, and honestly, I kinda forgot about it until recently. Safe to say, I eventually got around to it.

I somehow got $300 in Google Cloud credit. Never used Google Cloud before. Thought maybe it’s a good excuse to mess around and try something new. I bounced around a few ideas at first. I really wanted to try setting up some type of cloud gaming thing, that’s been a project I’ve been meaning to figure out for months now. But turns out, with the free trial you don’t get any GPU access, which basically made that idea dead before it started.

For years I’ve been trying to host my own personal site and nothing ever worked out how I wanted.

My first attempt was with **Namecheap**, where I originally bought my domain. It was cheaper than running a VM on a cloud provider, so I gave it a shot. But the site builder through cPanel was extremely slow, and email was a pain to manage. Support wasn’t great either. I tried a few times to make it work, but it never felt right. I built a basic site... and then it just sat there.

A year later, I gave **Bluehost** a try. I wanted to start blogging and they had a good intro offer, so I went for it. But honestly, it was overpriced and clunky. In hindsight, I could’ve hosted WordPress on a VM for less, but I wasn’t confident enough technically yet. When the year was up, I canceled and moved everything to **Cloudflare**, where my site sat again, this time just redirecting to my LinkedIn.

For the longest time, SeifJuban.com just pointed to other places, until recently. I’d been helping friends build their sites and realized: I should finally have my own._ With the rise of platforms like GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages, it felt like the right time.

This is my first blog post written in Obsidian!