I’ve finally done it: months after starting work on this website, I’ve completed all the essential components of this website. Notably, there’s a new My Projects page that has links to long-form descriptions of all the major projects I’ve taken part in over the years. The hardest part of making this was actually writing those pages, but once that was done Jekyll did the heavy lifting and generated a website to my liking. I also got dark mode working!

Obviously there’s still stuff left to do. The Projects page is currently organized in alphabetical order (which doesn’t make much sense, it should really be chronological by when I worked on each project). There’s far too little content on the Posts page (entirely my own fault for not writing enough about what I’ve been working on). My resume itself could also do with a few updates now that I’ve gotten involved with new programs at UT Austin.

But there’s always going to be something or other to do. Perfection is a goal that no one ever reaches; for now, I’m content with what I have and comfortable declaring this website “finished”. Here are some screenshots:

Screenshot of my new Projects page.

Screenshot of my TJ Space Program project page.

Not too bad, right? Don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing compared to the beautiful websites some of my friends have with fade-ins, parallax, and things flying around. But that was never the goal—I just wanted a website that had all the information I wanted to share in one place, and that’s what I created here.

There are actually some unexpected pros to having a completely static website. Richard Stallman, a staunch advocate of free software, explains in this essay how sites that use JavaScript can execute non-free software in the form of obfuscated JS on people’s computers without their explicit consent. It also opens up many potential security vulnerabilities that just don’t exist with simple static sites. While I’m not as much of a die-hard open source supporter as Stallman, it’s good to know that my website is friendly to people who want to opt out of JavaScript for whatever reason.

In any case, today marks the end of a months-long journey to set up a personal website where I can show the world the best parts of myself. It was not easy to get to this point, but I did, and for that I’m incredibly proud.