🌻new beginnings
Edited Jul 27
🌻

new beginnings

July 8, 2026 • 3 min read • 84 views

Every so often, I get the urge to redesign my personal website.

My first experience with web development was in middle school, playing around with HTML and CSS in my free time and learning syntax from a book. I've come a long way since then (and so has programming as a whole), but my love for expressing myself online is as strong as ever.

Ever since I've owned this domain, I've maintained a part of my identity on the internet. This latest iteration continues that .

Hopefully, the inspiration is obvious. I'm a huge Notion enthusiast and it felt like a fitting theme for my latest revamp. I've been ruminating on this design concept for a minute, and I finally got around to bringing it to life (thanks Codex).

I had three main priorities when reimagining this site:

  1. Build something that felt unique and reflective of myself
  2. Make it interactive
  3. Create a place to write for the internet

I am especially excited about the third point.

For years, I've wanted a place to jot down thoughts for anyone and everyone. In fact, some of the first websites I ever created were WordPress blog sites. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into my workflow, I wanted a reason to practice writing for myself more. I've felt myself subconsciously offload more and more of my thinking, and wanted to return to the simplicity of a text editor and my own thoughts.

I've also wanted a place to brain dump online. This site will hopefully serve both purposes.

However, this won't be a traditional blog. I may occasionally post life updates, but I'm not planning on committing to anything regular. I also hope to write more about things I'm thinking about, hence the musings label. I know... who needs another tech bro voicing his opinions on the internet.

Now, for a little history:

I was gifted this domain in May 2019. At the time, I was just graduating middle school. The first iteration was a WordPress site hosted on a Google Cloud VPS. I distinctly remember trying to use NGINX as a reverse proxy and spending hours trying to debug it. It's weird, but it almost feels nostalgic reminiscing on a pre-AI era where even the simple problems took ages to solve.

Eventually, I began to code my site using HTML and CSS, and in 2021, I finally migrated my code to GitHub. In fact, I think this migration was my first commit ever. It's kind of crazy looking back now and seeing how drastically things have changed.

I also became obsessed with self-hosting open source projects on my cloud server. One of my pastimes was to browse awesome-selfhosted and waste a few hours installing software that I had genuinely no use for. YOURLS, a url shortener written in PHP, was my favorite and most memorable. I LOVED using a subdomain to redirect anywhere on the internet. In time, I learned that others loved it too. Turns out hackers were using my url shortener to create phishing links...

Phishing screenshot

An early and very needed lesson in building secure systems

Eventually, I moved off my cloud server and started using GitHub pages to deploy. And at the start of 2025, I started over. I switched my tech stack to Typescript and React, and began deploying on Vercel.

You're looking at the result of many iterations over seven years and hundreds of commits. Here's to the hundreds more to come. 🥂

Honestly, I have no clue if anyone will end up reading these posts. Maybe I'm writing to the ether and the usefulness of these posts will end at training GPT-7. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

Stay tuned!