Making This Website

On the motivation and the design process behind making this website

The Motivation

I had been wanting to get back to making projects for some time but never really knew what to go for. Having endless ideas in my Notes app, I was just never motivated to start working on a project. Adding to that was the extra burden from my last few courses that I had to take for my university and thus I had completely pushed the idea aside. However, it is my very good friend Keane who really pushed me to make my corner of the internet! Sure, I had seperate spaces for my long essays on Substack, to technical essays on Medium and my photography on Instagram, but I never really had a corner that linked all my personalities together. As a result of that push, this website was born.

The Design Inspiration

I never really made any figma files to begin with. I just knew what color scheme I wanted, the number of links and what I wanted to show the world. And so I started out, making a very rough template on my Goodnotes and making changes along the way.

One of the things I also wanted to achieve with this website, was to be confident in my identity and not hesitate to show the world where I am from. This was a huge influence in my design choices and thus the hindi cursives on my website. Moreover, the dark colors of purple, combined with the cream text are a common color scheme for many fancy Indian attire so the color scheme is a reflection of the nationality, of the identity I wear everyday. In terms of technology, I decided to go with React and Next.js since that was my friends suggested me to go for. Having learnt React roughly 4 ish years ago, I did not how to begin. And this is where every software engineer's modern friend, GPT, comes into play. I had heard about Cursor but never really tinkered with it. As someone who was apprehensive of the whole concept of "vibe coding", I wasn't really keen on using AI to build my entire website. I had so many posts about researchers pointing out critical flaws in vibe coded apps and so wasn't sure as to how do I begin. My usual approach ? Learn the basics plus just enough advanced techniques to make my website on my own. However, given how fast paced everything is and how quickly I saw people shipping fully functional web applications in a few days, I couldn't help but wonder, "Do these people really know the ins and outs of React to be able to make such large web applications ?" Turns out they had been "vibe-coding" all along. Maybe that's all the motivation I needed to hop on this train to see for myself.

AI Made me fell in love with engineering (again)

Launching Cursor AI, there I was with a blank file, about to begin my "vibe-coding" sessions. I started with a clear prompt on Claude, laying out what I wanted and what tools would I need. One prompt led to another, one design choice led to another and after a few days, I had my basic site set up, and that too full responsive. It is crazy to think how much these tools can make your life easier when you have no idea where to begin. I feel that going forward, my entire workflow is going to change. Using AI to help with ideas and tools has and will become a common thing in the industry. At the same time, I don't want you to blindly copy paste the solution that is being proposed to you. While I did not know any React, I certainly was able to read the code changes that Cursor made and understand how things were being fetched and dsiplayed. The only way I was ever able to understand the code was through my experience building scripts with C++, Python, Rust as well detecting vulnerabilities in code, as a security software engineer like me must be aware of. What I am trying to say is be in the driver's seat and control the car the way you want it. Make sure you know all the components of the car, along with the corners of the road you are driving on, since there is no point sitting blindly and driving, hoping to cross the finish line!

That was it for this piece! Stay tuned for more :)

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Written on 2025-06-18