This site has gone through multiple iterations over the years. In 2015, the inception of my personal blog was created on Wordpress and hosted on Bluehost, and was intended to be a portfolio of my personal projects to showcase when applying to jobs. I spent a lot of time hunting for a suitable theme, and stuck with one for about a year.
In 2016, I wanted to start writing blog posts instead of just having a portfolio, and since I wanted more flexibility in how I was displaying content, I ventured into static site generators and settled on Hugo and used Bootstrap to create a custom theme. Later on, as I matured in my career, I realized that having a portfolio was no longer as relevant, so I combined the two types of content into a single blog-like website.
In 2019, I updated the styling to use more modern themeing. Then in 2021, I tried optimizing the git history to reduce the size when checking out, but made some critical errors (in not understanding what commands1 I was executing from StackOverflow) and had migrated to a new repo since, at the time, it was easier to start fresh than try and fix the mess that I made.
Returning from a break of creating content in 2025, I had a wave of motivation to update my website yet again. This current version is the third (and hopefully final) iteration, which does away with Bootstrap in favour of a more lightweight option. The site’s design uses plain HTML, CSS, and very minimal Javascript, and is based on a custom theme styled with Neat CSS. The typeface leverages system-ui instead of custom typography from Google Fonts to ensure fast page rendering and avoid the dreaded FOUT.
Content is written in Goldmark-powered Markdown. Code syntax highlighting is enabled by Chroma. Mathematical formulas are rendered by Mathjax. Icons are provided by Font Awesome.
Domain management and DNS are handled through Namecheap. Hosting is managed by Github Pages, where the site’s content is stored in this repository and deployed automatically via Github Actions.
This site uses Google Analytics to help understand visitor traffic and usage patterns. Data collected is anonymous and used solely for improving the website experience.
Pro tip: Don’t run git filter-repo --strip-blobs-bigger-than 1M thinking that it won’t also nuke all your currently used media files above that size. ↩︎