Every once in a while, I get into this productivity slump where I don’t write code for weeks, and it gets hard to get back into the rhythm of working again. For me, the easiest way out of it is to redesign this website. It’s low-effort (relatively), gets some creative juices flowing and has little risk of not panning out ultimately.

And I guess it kinda worked. I spent two whole days on the redesign, and am pretty pleased with the results. Documenting the major decisions I took this time around in this post.

Writing intros to posts is such a hard thing. I’ve spent more time on what to write in this paragraph than the rest of this article. You’re supposed to start with a background and a motivation, and conclude with a sentence that you finally did it, and here is how.

I have not done it yet. This thing keeps evolving. As to why I started doing this: it’s fun. It’s fun and powerful to be in control of where your information resides. It’s fun to build a system to manage this efficiently. There are also some benefits too: much more control over my data and the services. These are also all open-source so I can add missing features which I really really want, and I don’t have to abide by the restrictive terms and limits of other platforms. And I don’t lose everything if a platform wants to shut itself down or delete my account for using their product wrong.

In March 2019, I left my job at Tower Research Capital, to take a small break from work and live aimlessly for a while. My mental health had been declining steadily for the last few years, and going away for a while seemed like the only way out.