7 March 2026

Evolution of my Website

Notes from a website I keep coming back to

Welcome to the 12th million version of my website!

I built my first website in 2017 — a one-pager with some icons and my resume to impress employers. Today, I wanted a platform simply to write.

History

It all started in 2017, a week before I was traveling to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration India. There was a career fair to attend, and I was preparing my resume for the first time ever. Then my dear mentor, Arya Murali, asked me, "How are you going to stand out among the thousands of people there with the same background?"

Gah, I don't know. I thought I was smart.

Then she said, maybe you should have your own website and a business card.

Ehhh? Really? The naive me of 2017 had no clue why or how that would even be possible. What do I put on it? Where do I host a website?

The answers came quickly. Without batting an eyelid, she gifted me a domain with my name on it (what a gift — it blew my mind). She told me, “You don't have to pay me back. When you're in a position to afford this, maybe you can buy another woman a domain.” That idea eventually grew into the Domain Name Scholarship (DNS) program, which we ran for two years to help women get their own domains.

She also sent me a list of articles with steps on how to create and host a website using Jekyll templates and GitHub. Soon, I had a simple website with my resume, social media links, and a picture — done. The QR code to the website went on the card, and voilà, I had my first business card too. I don’t know if that’s what landed me a job at the career fair, but preparing for it did shape a part of me.

Over the years, I continued an on-and-off relationship with the website concept. I learned more about personal branding and spent some months obsessed with making it perfect. I tried various options like Google Sites and eventually moved to a template website builder (Mobirise — bless you!), which would automatically connect to GitHub and made things simple. I spent too much time adjusting pixels (within the limits of the free templates) without actually writing anything other than intros. At one point, I stopped renewing the domain. I felt super bad about not making the most of that gift, but I let it go.

Then sometime last year, I needed a side project. I went back, bought the domain again, tried a few things here and there, and then left it again. The passion always stayed… for about a week. Meh. Vibe coding was in. Every new prompt-to-prototype platform I tried, I made a personal website with the same content — GitHub Spark, Lovable, Vercel, and so on.

March 2026

Maybe 2026 is the year, my friend.

My brain has been overflowing with thoughts I wanted to dump somewhere, and I was again on the hunt for the perfect platform. I was complaining that I wanted to write but had nowhere to do it, and RJT (hey, husband) said: Just write if you want to. What could possibly be blocking you from publishing some text right now?

With how easy it has become to create and host a website, and make it look however I want, using ChatGPT, VS Code, GitHub Copilot, and GitHub Pages, I had no excuses. So today, I decided to start again.

To note down things I feel like writing. I hope and pray this time it sticks, that I continue to capture a sudden spark, a memory, a funny thing that happened, or anything that made me think. That I put it here, and years later come back and find it again.Or maybe, in the future, another person like you will stumble upon it and wonder:

This was totally unnecessary...