New year, new blog!
I am super excited to finally unveil my revamped blog! 🎉 It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience so far. I have been writing blogs on all sorts of topics from AI to personal life since starting grad school, and looking back at my older posts as I wrap up 2024 fills me with a sense of accomplishment and gratitude :)
As someone who works day to day mostly on the scientific computation and/or backend ML stack like CUDA, C compilers, JAX, Jupyter you name it, I have always stayed away from hardcore front end development. When I built my older portfolio page, I wanted something that will take me away from building the frontend to set myself up quickly and I ended up with Hugo and a prepopulated template.
While the template served me well initially, I was too busy with other projects (you know how it is in the world of machine learning!) to invest much time in front-end development. I wanted a solution that would let me quickly get started and focus on my core strengths.
So this holiday season, while enjoying movies and quality time with my family (yes, I may have snuck in some coding sessions!), I decided to build a brand-new blog from scratch. Hey, what can I say? Some habits die hard! 😄 My family is used to it by now – they know they always have my full attention, no matter what I’m working on.
For my newer blog, I still chose to use Hugo for the backend, mainly because I like it’s go implementation and also the ability to create a static webpge. I swapped the whole front end template with html, css and javascript and put on my creative hat.
By the way, fun fact – When I was in elementary school (grade 5) I won a website building compeititon at the district board level! I built this cool website for the compeition themed around “Icecream shop” and you bet I used <marquee> ... </marquee> every chance I got. That was the first dev competition I’ve won!
It’s been quite fun to tweak my own webpage and make it authentically me. I updated the template a lot on my older webpage as well, but it always felt creatively restricting in a way on what changes I can make without breaking something. With this website, I made sure to build in a way where every peice of code is modular, not tightly coupled and easily maintanable.
For publishing the older site, I used netlify in my CI/CD, although it was convinient, I wanted to rely less as much as possible and updated my CICD pipelines to directly publish my hugo site to cloudflare as well. I had planned this change on my older website but never actually implemented it. As the saying goes If it works, don’t touch it! but since I am starting fresh and migrating anyways I felt it was nice time to update this as well. I will make another blog post on how you can set this up.
