if you’ve been to this website before, you already know what was here. a rotating “hello” in a few languages and not much else. just a placeholder. a way of saying i exist without actually saying anything. it did the job for a while, but there’s only so long you can look at an under-construction page (albeit with a beautiful CSS-only construction banner that took me hoooours to build) and call it a plan.
why now?
honestly, i just got tired of putting it off. i’d take muse from people’s sites, think “yeah, i should really set one up”, and then get swamped with excuses to do it later (never). eventually, the placeholder page just became an eyesore (all props * ch-ch * 😎👉👉 to that one friend who was bothered enough by it to push me on).
besides that, i’ve been long burnt out on social platforms. as they are right now, everything you post gets fed into an algorithm, “measured” for engagement, and then buried in a timeline. i wanted a space on the internet that i actually control. no feed, no likes, no one deciding who gets to see what. it just sits here, exactly how i leave it.
the infrastructure
the site is built with Astro. it’s mostly pre-rendered HTML and CSS. there’s a tiny bit of JS to handle the theme toggle, a custom cursor, and some fluid scrolling physics, but the core remains static. it doesn’t need to be bloated to be effective.
more importantly, it’s mine
!
i’ve been thinking lately about how much of our digital lives quietly runs through a handful of big-tech companies. they make things incredibly convenient, and for a long time, i was okay to just (letting my data) live rent-free (yeah, right, “free”! * rolls eyes *) on their servers and push code to their repositories. but eventually, i wanted to see how all the pieces are put together_—the engineer’s how.
so, i’m trying it different now—something i wanted to do for a very long time. it’s probably more work than it needs to be, but the code for this site isn’t on GitHub anymore; it’s on my own Gitea instance, self-built, tunneled and containerized, and powered by a tiny Raspberry Pi. Coolify helped with this setup, a lot. yes it broke sometimes (okay maybe more than sometimes), and when it did, it was entirely my oopsie. but i learnt something new in fixing that every time.
nevertheless, there’s something deeply grounding about that. knowing exactly where your data lives, understanding the stack beneath it, and being the one responsible for keeping the lights on. it’s a very humbling process, but i’m enjoying the quiet of it.
what you’ll find here
whatever i’m working through at the time. probably some mix of:
- technical notes: things i’m building, breaking, or trying to get my head around.
- learning out loud & building proud: there’s always something new and humbling to learn in this field, every day, including wrong turns.
- everything else: hobbies, books, whatever doesn’t fit anywhere else.
i know, that last one is intentionally vague. with a huge hope that it doesn’t end up becoming a section that quietly collects dust.
if any of this sounds worth following, stick around. if not, there are 3 easter eggs hidden around the site. have fun on the lookout for those.
thanks for reading. more to come. live long and prosper 