Five years ago I built my first personal website. And by “built” I mean I forked a very nice starter theme, changed the name to mine, and called it a day. It served me well. It also looked exactly like the personal website of every other developer who forked the same theme, which — statistically speaking — is most of them.
You can still visit the old one here. It's a time capsule: I was 22, a “senior” only in the university sense of the word, and my proudest listed skill was dual-booting Kali Linux. Be kind to him. He didn't know about on-call yet.
So what changed?
Everything and nothing. The stack is still Next.js and Tailwind — deliberately boring, exactly how I like my infrastructure. But this time the design is mine: I stole the warm, papery aesthetic from the design language I admire most right now, and the copywriting tone from companies brave enough to admit their website is written by a human.
The old site was a blog with a portfolio attached. This one is a portfolio with a blog attached. That distinction matters exactly as much as you think it does, which is not at all — but it felt important to type.
What survived the migration
All three blog posts from 2021. Yes, three. I posted three times and then took a five-year break, like a band that releases one good album and disappears. The posts are preserved here word-for-word, including the load balancer explainer I wrote back when I had only read about load balancers — and years before I'd spend my days tuning actual ones in production. Foreshadowing is a literary device.
What's next
I'd like to say “regular posts about distributed systems, Go, and things I break at work.” My track record suggests otherwise. Let's agree on this: the next post will arrive sometime before the next redesign. That's a promise with a five-year SLA, and I intend to beat it.
Best,
Ankit