colophon / behind the scenes
workin' with the garage door open
Design
Why is this site so barebones? aren't you a designer? it feels more honest this way.
The design of the site was inspired by John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity.
Typography
This site uses Geist, because it's nice and plain. It will default to system font if Geist isn't available. Because I don't want to import anything custom or use CDN.
Tech stack
Built with Next.js 15.1.0 and Tailwind CSS 3.4.16. Hosted on Vercel. Privacy friendly analytics with self-hosted Umami.
A note on privacy and data: I don't use cookies or collect any of your data on this site. I don't sell anything or make any money on this site. I do use a cookie-free self-hosted analytics platform called Umami for basic metrics. The metrics I am most interested in are referring pages (to see who cares enough to link to this site and to maybe make new friends •ᴗ•), and visitor counts in aggregate (to get a sense of how many people are looking at specific things I've designed & written, and, I'll be honest, to get a small but nontoxic ego boost). What I am NOT interested in is tracking what individual visitors are doing.
Photography
Images were taken or created by Ganesh Kumar, if not stated otherwise.
Mockups
All mockups are done using Shots or hand made using Figma.
Inspiration
Pages that, in no particular order, inspired the current version of this site—visually, substantially, or personally at different times in my life.
These sources all represent a single principle: they use their websites as their home on the web—a place where they can hang their art, share their thoughts, collect insteresting artifacts, and present a piece of themselves to the world.
I have much care for these people (most of which I never met), so here’s my humble way of paying them respect. Go access their site, and be amazed as I was:
How this site uses AI
I use Claude AI for research, solving small problems in code, and maybe brainstorming some quick ideas, like getting an outline of things to say on a research paper, or what I should include in a presentation.
I try to use it not as an output tool, but as a thinking partner. A way to challenge my thinking. Sometimes I go back and forth with it to get different perspectives.
The only way I actually use generated AI content is when I code. You see, I’m mainly a researcher nowadays, so I want to be practical and up-to-date with code. AI makes it so much faster to do that.
I won’t, however, generate images, or text for this site (unless explicitly stated in the content). This website is not focused on conversions, or any of that. It’s sole function is to be place of my own in the web.
Any content I share here was written by me, either typed from a physical keyboard, or tapped on my iphone’s notes app, or handwritten on one of my notebooks.
Like Derek says, “it’s about the doing I’m after, not having it done”.