I initially built this website around 2024. Nothing fancy, just your standard showcase, but it quickly became another forgotten side project, buried beneath a mountain of lab reports, code commits, and other stuff in my life. Months later, during one of those midnight group chats, I had an epiphany. You know the type: someone randomly mentions how important a personal site is and everyone just agrees. Suddenly, I realised I was exactly in that boat. GitHub repos are nice, but they’re kind of like a messy room—good luck finding the cool stuff buried deep. And don’t even get me started on CVs. They’re stiff, cramped, and they barely show anything interesting about who you are or what you actually do.
That’s when I knew I needed my own space. Something simple, easy to navigate, and clean. Basically the opposite of what modern web development usually feels like these days. Seriously, have you seen how bloated websites have gotten? It feels like every little blog needs a giant framework, 17 plugins, and enough JavaScript to launch a rocket.
Nope, not for me.
That’s why I fell in love with Astro. It was my first time using Astro, and honestly, I wish I’d tried it sooner. It’s fast, simple, and lets me add just a bit of JavaScript only when I really need it. Astro felt like discovering a hidden gem that didn’t force me to sacrifice simplicity for functionality. Perfect.
For styling, I avoided frameworks completely, mainly because I’m tired of writing those long code with Tailwind that stretches to the bottom of the mariana trench. Just good old plain CSS. Why complicate things when CSS alone gets the job done easily? It might not be fancy, but it’s exactly what I wanted: lightweight and straightforward. Plus, having full control over the design feels surprisingly satisfying. I do use Skeleton as the base for the styling though, it helps a ton when dealing with responsiveness, my arch nemesis.
Hosting is another story. I skipped the popular choices like Vercel or Netlify and went old-school with my own VPS. But I wasn’t crazy enough to handle deployments manually—I set up GitHub Actions instead. Honestly, it was my first-ever CI/CD setup that didn’t immediately feel annoying. Push the code to my repo, automatic deploy, done. Simple and clean.
Another reason I wanted my own site is flexibility. I love writing technical articles, and sometimes text alone doesn’t cut it. I’m planning to build interactive simulations (think optics), something mainstream blogging platforms usually frown upon. Heartbreaking, really 💔. Here, I can do whatever I want, add mini-games, experiments with plain JavaScript, or even make interactive demos.
In short, this website is my digital playground. It’s simple, clean, and built exactly how I like it: with minimal bloat, pure CSS, Astro magic, and just enough JS to keep things interesting. Feel free to poke around, break things, and maybe even enjoy a mini-game or two while you’re here. 😋