As I set out to design my website, I ended up spending most of my time exploring countless beautifully designed websites for inspiration. With how creative people can get, it was quite easy to forget the original reason why I wanted a website in the first place.
Each portfolio and blog I went through displayed the unique tastes of the creator, with a subtle charm which brought life to their work. They brought with them their quirky twists to the expected, painting their imagination within a virtual space.
Me? I wanted to explore writing a technical blog, which could also showcase my experience, something akin to a portfolio. What did I end up with? 3 months of running behind a mistaken target.
After seeing all these lovely websites, I could only comfort myself by hiding behind a label of facing a "Designer's Block", one that made an existing Writer's Block even more uncomfortable.
The process of moulding disparate thoughts into a well-crafted "product" is not a straight-forward task, nor does it have a scientific approach. Sure, there are guidelines, but there is no single correct way of doing things.
The so-called "creative process" is, at best, an unorthodox – and often unclear – path in collecting our thoughts in a presentable manner. For my website, the standard way to approaching this would have been to just take the next best framework you can find and get started with a template.
This blog is my solution to disrupting the standard process. To moving forward.
Here's what I plan to do instead: With a minimal Hugo setup using the XMin theme, I'm going to update this blog regularly while updating the styling for better aesthetics and accessibility.
What I realised in these past few months, is that my initial motivations for wanting a personal website had changed. Last year just before applying for internships, I had created my first version of this website on GitHub in just under 30 minutes, some from scratch, some from stitching together some of my code from different places. It was okay.
This year, I've joined a Hyderabad-based company, Keka HR, as an intern and I'm planning to blog more often as I learn more things. I've been regularly trying to write more articles and drafting my ideas over the weekend. This little space, so to speak, is my place to collect my writings and to showcase a few trinkets that I'm building.
Thoughful design begins with content; when the content changes over time, the design needs to follow. This is my attempt at creating a hopefully creative, functional website.
I dare say the benchmarks will call this a pretty fast website.