About this site

Why this exists

My portfolio and this blog serve different purposes.

A portfolio should be clean show projects, highlight work, explain outcomes. If I start dumping long posts about debugging or system design there, it becomes messy. Nobody wants to scroll through five engineering deep-dives to find a project demo.

So I separated them. Portfolio stays focused. Writing gets its own home.

Why not Hashnode or Medium

Hashnode and Medium are solid platforms. For most people, they're the right call.

But I write about systems. Building them, debugging them, understanding how they work. It felt weird to do that on a platform where I have zero control over the system itself.

I wanted to own:

• how pages render
• how content gets indexed
• how the site is structured
• how things evolve over time

Plus, building the platform yourself lets you experiment with stuff most blog platforms can't handle custom layouts, interactive diagrams, weird post structures. The blog is part of the experiment.

Engineering motivation

The other reason was technical.

My portfolio is a React SPA. Works fine for UI stuff, but I wasn't happy with how it handled content SEO felt off, server rendering was non-existent, and metadata control was annoying.

This site gave me a chance to try TanStack Start and see what server-first rendering actually looks like. Better routing, better performance characteristics, tighter control over how things load.

So yeah, this is both a writing platform and a sandbox for trying things out.

Writing philosophy

This isn't a tutorial blog. I'm not trying to teach Next.js basics or explain what REST APIs are.

It's more about documenting how I approach problems. The stuff that usually shows up here:

• backend systems
• debugging weird issues
• architectural decisions
• trade-offs when building things
• lessons learned the hard way

I'm not rushing to post every week. The goal is clarity, not frequency. If someone reads this later and it helps them think through a similar problem, cool.

Long-term goal

Over time, this should become a searchable archive of engineering thinking. Not a feed you scroll through, but something you dig into when you're stuck or curious.

If it helps someone work through a problem more clearly, that's a win.