Redesign: A new home for my writing

For a while, vidhanjain.com was a single page: a big gradient headline, a grid of glowing cards, and a "Get in touch" button. It looked fine. It also said almost nothing about me that my resume didn't already say better.

So I rebuilt it as a personal website instead of a portfolio.

What changed

A portfolio is a sales page. It's written for someone deciding whether to hire you, and it's done the moment it's published. A personal site is closer to a notebook that happens to be public. It grows, it has opinions, and it's allowed to be unfinished.

The new site is split into a few pages, each with one job:

• Blog for notes and longer posts
• Research for papers, each with a summary in plain words
• Projects for things I've built
• Photos for the non-work side of life
• About me for everything else, plus a now page

How it's built

It's a static site built with Eleventy and hosted on Vercel. Blog posts are Markdown files. Research papers and projects each live in a small JSON file, and the photos page pulls in whatever I upload to Pinterest, so adding a paper means adding a few lines instead of copying a block of HTML around.

src/
├── _data/          # publications, projects, photos, site info
├── _includes/      # layouts and shared pieces (sidebar, footer)
├── blog/           # one Markdown file per post
├── assets/         # CSS, JS, images, photos
└── *.njk           # one file per page

No framework, no client-side routing, one stylesheet. Pages load fast and should keep working for a long time.

What's next

Mostly writing. I have a backlog of things I learned during my M.Tech that never made it out of my lab notebook: why tiny objects are so hard for detectors, what actually moved the needle in my ablations, and how I set up experiments in MMDetection. Those are coming.

If you want to follow along, there's an RSS feed.