Beginnings
Setting up this 'portfolio' website took me quite a while, longer than I had anticipated. Building this took a lot of CSS customization and tinkering with Markdown syntax. There was a certain aesthetic I wanted, and owing to my disdain for frontend design and the messed-up token limit of Claude, ChatGPT was my savior.
Bearblog gives the developer a lot of freedom when it comes to customizing styling. It lets you modify the CSS itself irrespective of the selected theme. I had a certain design in mind, and I kept copy-pasting the CSS code in the model and spent a lot of time testing it here. It was quite a painstaking process even though AI was doing most of the heavy lifting. After a lot of prompts and 'AI Fatigue' I eventually managed to get the desired UI for this site.
My initial attempt at setting up a portfolio page failed miserably. I have been blatantly abusing the 'Big Pickle' model from OpenCode nowadays owing to its vast token limit in the free plan, and surprisingly good performance when working on a project whose foundations have been laid by a better model. It took me a lot many hours of prompting and testing to set up the website, including integration with Supabase and Vercel and building a full-fledged backend dashboard to manage my posts and projects. Considering I was building from scratch, device responsiveness was also a grave concern and took its own sweet time to work on. Eventually, I gave up because I couldn't fathom the amount of work it would take to maintain the website later on, and stuck with whatever the hell this is.
A good thing about Bearblog is that it's very minimal and lightweight. It runs on vanilla JS on the frontend and doesn't need those heavy React frameworks which I could never grasp for the life of me despite my best efforts. There was a period in 2024 where I was formally planning to learn web development with the likes of the MERN stack and React, but by then the AI wave had washed ashore, and there was really no more need for me (or anyone else) to learn frontend development. Everyone was just a prompt away from making a professional-looking landing page.
Another good thing about Bearblog is that it's more inclined towards text than those fancy visual UI elements. A site like this is a boon for people who like to write and dabble more with articles and non-visual long-form content. Even though the restriction on uploading images for free-tier users is a bit harsh, I won't complain much owing to the upsides this platform offers.
Anyways, this is more than enough for a 'first' post. If you want to read more of my technical writing, you can visit me on Medium. If you are not too fond of tech, terminals, and code snippets, then you can read my essays and poems on The Dork Digest, where I have been writing for as long as I can remember (since 2018).
Cheers! :)