10 years ago, I entered college. I had decided back then that I’d continue maintaining Sabernova, my first sincere foray into blogging. But I knew it wasn’t well-built and had outstanding issues. A perfectionist mindset took over that made me hesitant to type out blogger.com. I never got around to authoring since. Over the years, I’d continue putting blogging on the back burner conjuring all kinds of excuses, the latest of which was that I’d build my own blogging platform in high-performance Rust (bwuahahaha).

I guess it’s high time to say—fuck it—I’m just going to start writing again.

Journey so far…

I’ve been lucky to have a PC of my own early enough, circa 2005, thanks to my wonderful parents. They also hooked it up with a blazing-fast 1 Mbps BSNL broadband line to get me unfettered access to the craziest sites on the interwebs. My PC wasn’t much to write home about—a bog-standard HCL with an Intel inside, hooked to a CRT monitor with a resolution of 1024*768. But to me, it was like giving a kid holding a chocolate bar the keys to the Wonka factory. No other toy would come close.

Orkut was the first medium through which I let the world know who my favorite cartoon characters were, what game I was playing, what song I was listening to and play some light pranks on unsuspecting visitors. I was also fascinated by Orkut’s theming capability, which was probably ripped off from MySpace. The ensuing XSS attacks were also hilarious (and scary). It was my first glimpse at web development although, I didn’t know it at the time since I was just copy-pasting stuff other strangers wrote.

In hindsight, this is still how most professional tech work gets done.

Later, once my PC chops improved and I got better at traversing the web, I became ambitious. Having discovered cracking software and friends asking me all sorts of “How do I do X?” questions, I figured I need more real estate and control than Orkut to disseminate my thoughts. That’s when I started learning more about web development and how to publish a site on the web. I was initially put off by the fees for hosting a website, which would’ve made it a tough sell with my parents. Luckily, I stumbled upon Google’s Blogger platform. It seemed perfect to me.

A good friend of mine suggested a catchy name and I christened my first site universalia. I wasn’t really sure what to put on the site back then besides some shoddy memos about upcoming events. I frequented sites like CNET and GameSpot which led me to believe it was a good idea to copy and paste their articles into my site. I’d even get some of my friends to join as co-authors ripping off websites on a daily basis. But this got boring quickly and thankfully, I never got in trouble for it. I had discovered website monetization around this time but for various reasons, my AdSense accounts would get blocked after setting them up. Well, it probably had something to do with me asking my friends and family to drive up views and clicks. The questionable “free” domain I got via .tk registry ended up causing all sorts of headaches, which led to a quick demise of the site. I believe that ccTLD still warrants a huge warning sign.

Then came Sabernova. I’m sure I spent weeks trying to come up with that name. But this time, it felt cooler. I convinced my parents to give up their debit card so that I could make my first digital purchase—sabernova.com. I wouldn’t simply rip articles this time. Instead, I’d focus on reviewing software I had tried, write about the cool gadgets I own and make how-to guides for other lost souls. I did however, write about cracking Adobe software which drove a lot of engagement that took me by surprise (and caused a lot of concern later). It was wonderful to see the flood of comments from all over the world thanking me for writing helpful guides. This boosted my confidence. I was able to get monetization to work this time without any finger-wagging from Google. So far, I earned close to $100 which isn’t a lot but it did feel like I was going to make it into the big leagues back then.

Sabernova also made me fall in love with the web and the holy trio of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I’d spend a lot of time going over pirated copies of premium templates to figure out their cool features. It was a fun exercise to decode heavily obfuscated templates, which is common even today for paid web themes. With every little tweak or widget added, my knowledge would increase a tiny bit. A lot of my learnings came from trial and error, which is something the current me needs to be reminded more of. I’d eventually find some books to learn further, like the evergreen HTML & CSS: Design and Build Websites by Jon Duckett, which is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever laid my eyes on. I got so much better that I could make brand-new widgets and menus all by myself without the copy-pasta.

Blogging not only improved my technical prowess—it made me a lot better at speaking and writing English. The progression is obvious when I compare my first and last article. It made me a lot more confident at school and later at my university, where I was able to lead a lot of initiatives with other smart people. Even though I never calculated an ROI back when I started it, blogging has perhaps had the most significant contribution in my language skills development (besides watching tons of Hollywood movies, of course).

Looking back, I feel a bit disheartened for abandoning the site. I didn’t make better efforts in capitalizing on my success. Over the recent years, I occasionally checked in and tweaked the site so that it’s not broken. Thankfully, stuff that broke were often related to Google Ads, Analytics and images that reference third-party sites (that could’ve been worse). My views on monetization, ads and web have greatly shifted since the last decade so it was an easy decision—throw them all out. The site is still online at the time of writing this. I plan to archive it one last time and put it to rest by the fall.

Phase 3

This brings us to the present. Over many years now, I’ve grown fond of tasteful design and minimalism. This made it easy to stick to Markdown for this blog instead of any rich-text solutions although I admit, when done right, I’d prefer the latter. But that’s a rarity these days. Hugo was another easy pick. It didn’t take me too long to set this site up and make the initial publication. Markdown also makes it convenient for me to change systems in the future, if I feel like it, which I do.

I’ve been drawn lately towards cutting the cruft in web development. I realized how bad things are these days when I got frustrated at Reddit for axing Apollo, the only thing that kept it bearable on my iPhone. I want to ramble more on the fact of how utterly terrible some of the modern web experiences are, which are probably driven by the need to over-optimize on user engagement metrics and ads and almost never on actual user experience. I was flummoxed when I discovered faster and privacy-friendly alternative readers like Redlib and Nitter (before Elon killed it) which made it tolerable to browse these sites. And they are blazing fast, sparingly using JavaScript to enhance the web experience. While Hugo already fits the requirements for this website, I hope to keep tinkering with it until I build something that I truly own. A lot of refinements are yet to come.

For the time being, I will write. I’ve learned a lot and I learn still which I’d like to share with the world on a more frequent basis. Views on how things should be built. Several observations being a part of teams of a few to dozens of engineers. I don’t expect these findings to be optimal for everyone, nor everyone to agree with it. I’m open to changing them as I learn more each passing year. Change is the only constant. While I reckon the primary spiel here would be about tech, I also hope to share my thoughts on other aspects of my life and views on the present world.

So, stick around fellow reader if you’ve made it this far. I hope I’ll be able to impart a bit of wisdom and maybe, just maybe, entertain while doing this all over again.