The project that had no business existing.
It started with a reel. Not a plan, not a vision, not a career decision — a reel, at the back of a classroom, during a lecture I was present for in the loosest sense. Hostinger was selling .in domains for ₹9 a year. I bought one before the ad finished.
I did not know what to do with it. This became apparent almost immediately.
The domain pointed at nothing for a day. Then the research started — which is a generous word for what was, in practice, me discovering just how much I didn’t know, one search result at a time. Everything useful cost money. Everything free required skills I didn’t have. I found GitHub. I would describe my reaction to GitHub as the specific feeling of opening a door, seeing what’s inside, and very seriously considering just closing it again.
I didn’t close it. I copy-pasted whatever the AI gave me into whatever field looked right and pressed whatever button seemed relevant. The result was a white page with blue links — the look of a website that believes it is done. Sometimes it returned a 404 instead, which, in hindsight, was a fair response.
Things started moving when I found Codex. The agent made changes. The site did not change. This went on for a while. Eventually I discovered that GitHub has something called a Pull Request — essentially an official way of asking your code to please become real — and that I had been skipping this step entirely. My changes had been going nowhere. I had been, effectively, writing emails and never sending them.
(I want to be clear: I had no idea. None. I was looking for a Save button.)
The first merge conflict showed up next. Two versions of the same file, both convinced they were correct, and GitHub asking me to decide. I resolved it the wrong way. The site survived regardless, which I found reassuring.
I added Jules — Google’s AI coding agent — into the process around this point. Jules was very good at talking about code and considerably less good at writing it. I worked around this by using it only for ideas and code reviews, then taking those straight to Codex before Jules could get involved in anything that actually mattered. It was an unusual system. It worked.
And so it went, five to six hours a day, for one semester, between lectures and fests and everything else first year throws at you. What came out the other end is what you’re looking at now — a writing portfolio with a full search engine, a random-read button, a content management system, automated index generation on every push, Cloudflare handling the caching, and a custom domain that cost ₹9.
I learned what most of those technical terms meant roughly two weeks after building the things they describe.
Stack: GitHub Pages · Cloudflare · Pages CMS · GitHub Actions
Timeline: First year, B.Com Hons, Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University
Budget: ₹9
Status: The site you are currently reading.