Hello, world!

Hi there! Welcome to my new website. In this short one, I'd be sharing with you about why I went back to the drawing board. Enjoy!

A change of focus

In my previous site, I spent so much time stressing over how beautiful and engaging I needed it to look. I cared so much about cooking up the perfect micro interactions, how to factor in sleek gsap-style animations and other things that make a site "pop" and feel engaging. Overtime, I realized that it made me lose focus from what I really wanted my site to be about: communicating knowledge with simplicity and clarity. I want to focus more on my writing much more than the visual appeal and interactions on my site.

Keeping it simple

Over the course of my journey as a software engineer, I've come to really appreciate and work towards simplicity. In a world where creating stuff is now cheap, simplicity in my opinion would be a distinguishing element. So I wanted something very minimal, with less design choices, little or no animations, colors, elements; nothing too fancy. Just a place I plan to write, and write, and just write, communicate knowledge and share my experience! I look forward to seeing my blog posts grow in quality and quantity.

An opportunity to build with Nuxt

I love React and have written it for the past 4 years. So, unsurprisingly, I'm very used to it and comfortable with it's inner working. But I'd always been looking for an opportunity to write something different. I tried up Angular, but somehow, it felt like an overkill for my website or a side project. Vue was my next consideration but I didn't like it at first compared to the way I instantly connected to React back in 2021. So, early this year, I had to learn Vue in preparation for a new company I was going to join. My FE lead is a bit anti-react, so there was no escaping learning and mastering Vue. A few months down the line after joining the company and writing Vue a lot, I realized it wasn't such a bad idea.

So long story short, here we are ;‑).

This website was completely developed with Vue's official framework, Nuxtjs.

I'm full stack now ^_^

Being an engineer that works across the stack doesn't actually excuse you from having an interesting and visually appealing site. I believe that full stack engineers are tilted more to one side, either frontend or backend. For me, I've had to learn Golang, and write it in production level code at work over the past 6 months. Consequently, I find myself researching and learning more about backend stuff that frontend. This exactly has influenced how I thought when I was planning this website.

My previous site obviously showcased my frontend side, I had a sleek carousel, dark/light modes etc. I had a lot of fun building the UI, experimenting with animations, and trying to make every little interaction feel interesting. This time, I wanted to build something that reflects where my interests are currently taking me.

I still enjoy building sleek interfaces, and I still get excited about a well-designed component. But I'm currently and increasingly fascinated by the world behind the interface, and a bit bored of adjusting button positions and colors. Just kidding, frontend engineering is wayyyy more than that. :-}

So what's next?

Honestly? More writing!

Off the top of my head, I don't have a grand content plan or a list of fifty topics I'm going to write about. I just want to document what I'm learning (majorly backend related), the problems I'm solving, the things I'm getting wrong, and the things that eventually make sense.

There might probably be some frontend stuff in here too. I can't completely escape React just yet ^_^.

I also expect some of these posts to be rough around the edges. Some ideas will change as I learn more. Some things I write today might make me cringe a few years from now. But I think I'd rather have a compilation of how my thinking evolves than wait until I have everything perfectly figured out before I write anything.

So, welcome (again) to my new site.