The Versions Before This One

I have rebuilt this website more times than I can justify. Sometimes the old version was genuinely bad. Sometimes I had just learned something new and needed somewhere to put it. Either way, the result is the same: a graveyard of previous sites that each felt like the final form at the time.

This is a tour of that graveyard.

The first one

The very first version went up while I was still a computer science student at Cochin University. Big teal background, an illustrated avatar of me in a red hat, all-caps typography, "Programmer - UI/UX Designer - Techie" in the subtitle like I was writing my own trading card.

It is the kind of website you make when you are thrilled that you can make a website. The confidence is not entirely misplaced (it does function as a website) but the taste is still very much being assembled.

Hugo and the minimal era

At some point I decided simple was better and switched to Hugo with the PaperMod theme. The result was about as stripped back as a site can get: your name, a dark mode toggle, three buttons, and "Hey, glad you are here :P" as the hero text.

Looking back, this was probably the most usable version I ever had. It loaded instantly, worked on everything, required no build pipeline. I abandoned it because I was bored, which is the honest answer.

The Notion dashboard phase

This version tried to fit everything onto one page: a Now section, a projects grid, a quote, contact details, experience, all in an information-dense dashboard layout. The inspiration was clearly Notion, or possibly the kind of personal website that gets a hundred upvotes on Hacker News.

I liked the idea of a site that showed you what I was doing right now, not just what I had done. The execution was a bit much.

Going experimental

This is the version I am most proud of building and most embarrassed about in terms of actual usability. Dark background, bento-grid layout, live GitHub contribution graph, Discord status widget, Spotify now-playing, a blog section stitched together from several APIs.

The Spotify widget was genuinely fun. Everything else was probably unnecessary. But I learned a lot about API integrations and live data on the frontend, and honestly that knowledge is still paying off today.

Sheffield: the dark starfield

When I moved to Sheffield for my master's I wanted the site to feel like a fresh start. New city, new version. I went dark and minimal, full-viewport hero, starfield background, name centered, three social links, nothing else.

It looked great in screenshots. It also had essentially no content, which turned out to be a recurring theme.

The CV version

Somewhere in the Sheffield period I went the opposite direction and built something that was basically a very long online CV. Photo, title, location, availability status, download button, experience section. Functional, professional, completely without personality.

I used this one during job applications and then felt the immediate urge to replace it the moment things settled down.

The Delba clone

The Delba de Oliveira portfolio template was everywhere in the Next.js community for a while, and I liked it enough to use it as a starting point. Dark, blog-focused, avatar in the corner, recent posts on the front page. I customised it enough to feel like mine, but the bones were obviously borrowed.

There is nothing wrong with starting from a template. The mistake is staying there too long without making it your own, which I did for longer than I want to admit.

The downloaded portfolio

This version leaned into the project showcase angle. Clean dark layout, photo on the left, project cards filling the rest of the page. ML projects, RAG systems, the kind of content that looks good on a portfolio screenshot sent to a recruiter.

It served its purpose. Then I got the itch again.

The dashboard, revisited

By April 2025 I had another go at the dashboard idea, this time with more polish. Experience timeline, Spotify now-playing, a bento layout pulling from real data. The greeting was "Hello, World!" which felt charming at the time.

The Spotify card playing Kanninima Neele is accurate. Some things stay consistent across versions.

The grid era

Around this time I also had a version with a full-page grid background and a big bold hero that said "DATA SCIENTIST & MLOPS PROFESSIONAL". It looked sharp and felt professional. Pink-salmon accent, clean type, the works.

It did not last.

The one before this

The immediately previous version was probably the most finished thing I had shipped up to that point. Bento card layout, a latest posts section, now-playing from Spotify, last played from Steam. It had real personality and it pulled live data to show you a slice of what I was actually doing.

I replaced it anyway. I had a new idea.

This one

The current site is a departure from the dashboard approach. Less live data, more writing. A feed instead of widgets. A custom console you can actually type into. A theme system with multiple color options. The navbar shortcuts have keyboard labels because of course they do.

If you are reading this, you are already looking at it, so I will spare you the screenshot.

What I notice looking back is that every version was oscillating between two things: wanting the site to be a live dashboard of what I was up to, and wanting it to be a proper place for writing and projects. This version tries to hold both at once without the layout becoming the main character.

Whether it works is something only future-me can judge. He will probably rebuild it anyway.