You know the one. Dark background, purple-to-blue gradient, a hero that says "Hi, i'm [name], i build beautiful experiences," three project cards that lift up on hover, contact form nobody fills out. The other half went the opposite way: parallax WebGL heroes that take four seconds to spell a name, custom cursors with abandonment issues, page transitions ripped straight out of an Apple keynote. One hides behind a template, the other behind a tech demo. Neither is actually saying anything.

So when i rebuilt mine, i made one rule: it had to be ugly on purpose. It had to look like something. A real thing with real constraints. I landed on an old e-ink display, the kind that flashes every time it turns a page.

What the old one was

My old portfolio lived at minimal-portfolio, and it was never meant to be a Serious Thing. I just wanted to see how dumb i could get with Markdown. Blog, projects, tags, a "now playing" widget, comments... could all of that run off plain .md files and nothing else? Yeah, mostly. Comments lived in a Google Sheet of all things, which i still can't believe worked. The whole thing ran on Eleventy and Netlify, ugly in its own quiet way.

And it worked. Which is sort of exactly why it had to go. It had answered its question, so i started asking a new one.

This one is an experiment too

Don't get me wrong, this site is just as much an experiment. It just asks a scarier question.

The old one was "how far can i push Markdown for fun." This one is "if i had to put myself on the internet exactly the way i want to be seen, what would it look like?" Took me a while to even sit with that one.

I've been deep in UI lately, mostly being insufferable about details. You can see some of it on welabs.in, the company site i work on. And i made thisdesign.space as a public dumping ground for my taste: palettes, animations, the references i'd otherwise just hoard on a Pinterest board.

So this portfolio is the next step. It's intentionally retro, more cheap paperback than glassy gradient. A creative landscape, not a CV. If you land here and go "huh, what is this," then it's working.

What it is now

The new one runs on Next.js 15 (App Router), React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind v4, deployed to Vercel. Comments and view counts moved to Supabase, which is a real database, not a Google Sheet held together with hope.

But here's the part i actually care about: almost the entire site is still static HTML. Every page prerenders at build time. The only thing that runs live is /creative, which asks Spotify what i'm listening to and Discord whether i'm online.

So why a whole React framework for what is, 95% of the time, plain HTML? Because the interactive 5% is the actual point. A morphing image lightbox. A focus-reader that flashes one word at a time. A hidden Snake game. Try cramming any of those into a pile of .md files and tell me how that goes.

Okay, so why "ugly by design"?

Here's the design brief i wrote for myself. I'm quoting it because it's basically the soul of the whole thing:

A paperback for an old e-ink display. Warm grey-white paper, deep warm-black ink, no accent colour by rule. Motion only where the medium would have it. Nothing glides.

Every line in that is a rule that locks something out, and that's kind of the point. If you don't lock anything out, you end up reaching for everything.

So: no accent colour. I know, every design blog tells you to pick one. I banned it instead. The palette is paper (#e8e4dc), ink (#1a1814), some greys, and exactly one other shade allowed: a dried-stamp red, used at most twice on the whole site. Right now it's used once, as a tiny dot next to my role. That's the whole budget. Take colour away and suddenly the spacing and the typography have to actually pull weight, which honestly is what should've been happening from the start.

Two fonts, and each has a day job. Source Serif 4 reads, IBM Plex Mono labels. Serif says "you're reading something," mono says "you can click this." There's no decorative third font for hero text, because an old e-reader doesn't have one and i'm pretending to be one.

And nothing glides. This is the rule i love most. Real e-paper physically can't ease. It flashes and snaps in hard steps. So on this site, nothing eases. Every transition is steps(), not a curve. The cursor doesn't blink smoothly, it snaps on and off. Click to another page and the whole screen does a stepped redraw flash, like an e-reader turning over. The steppy-ness isn't decoration, it's the joke. The site is pretending to be a physical thing, and physical things are pretty bad at smooth.

The part where it gets unhinged

There's a toggle in the corner that turns on full E-Ink mode, and this is where i stopped pretending to be reasonable.

Flip it on. Your scroll stops scrolling and starts page-turning, snapping a whole screen at a time like the next-page button on an old reader. Leave a page and a faint, dithered imprint of it hangs around for a beat and then burns off in hard steps, the exact ghosting artifact real e-readers leave behind on a partial refresh. Highlight some text and instead of a normal selection you get a textured, dithered marker over the passage, like somebody took a stylus to the screen. Essays set themselves justified with hyphenation, so the right edge goes flat like a printed page.

None of this makes the site better in any way a Lighthouse score would measure. It just makes it memorable, which is the only metric a portfolio is actually graded on. Nobody is going to hire me because my contact form has nice focus states. They might remember the guy whose site pretended to be an old e-ink display and hid a game of Snake in it.

Anyway

I don't really have a Big Takeaway here. The boring portfolios aren't boring because their owners lack taste. They just gave themselves zero rules, and zero rules averages out to whatever the rest of the internet already looks like.

So make some rules. Ideally stupid ones. Mine was "what if this was an e-reader from 2009" and somehow we ended up here.

My site is ugly. It's slow-feeling on purpose, it's the colour of a cheap napkin, and it won't let you scroll smoothly. But it's fucking mine and i can do whatever i want with it.

"Less is only more where more is no good." Frank Lloyd Wright

Note: This essay represents my personal thoughts. AI assistance was used to refine grammar and spelling, but all opinions and arguments are entirely my own.

Coding used to be hard. Like, actually hard. Not everyone could do it and that was kind of the point. A small group of people knew how to build things with a computer and that skill alone was enough to change the world. That's literally how we got Google, Facebook, Microsoft. A few people in a room who could build what nobody else could.

Now? Anyone can do it. You have an idea at 2 AM, you open Claude or ChatGPT, explain what you want in plain english, and boom, you have something working by morning. Vibe coding is real and honestly it's pretty cool that it exists.

But i have one genuine question that nobody seems to be asking.

Where is the new Zuckerberg?

More people are building things right now than ever before in history. The barrier is basically gone. Any person with a laptop and an idea can ship something over a weekend. So why isn't anyone changing the world? Why does everything kind of look the same?

I think it's because when everyone can build anything, the thing you build stops mattering as much. The second you make something good, five other people make the exact same thing. The edge is gone before you even find it. We have way too many builders and not enough people with a genuinely new idea.

The Dune Parallel

And this actually reminds me of something from Dune. (Bear with me here.)

In Dune there's this event called the Butlerian Jihad where humanity had become so dependent on machines to do their thinking that they basically forgot how to think for themselves. When the machines were gone, they were lost. The whole point was that when you hand off the hard part, you slowly lose the thing that made you dangerous in the first place.

I'm not saying AI is going to cause a rebellion or anything dramatic like that. I'm just saying, are we trading the part where we actually think hard about a problem for the convenience of just... asking a chatbot? Because that struggle, that's where the good ideas come from.

My Actual Prediction

Here's where my actual prediction comes in though.

I think in the next 7 to 10 years the whole idea of "apps" is going to feel outdated. Right now you have one app for photos, one for notes, one for music, one for work, another one your company makes you use that you hate. It's everywhere and it's exhausting.

What i think is coming is one single software that basically knows you. Your habits, your preferences, everything. And instead of you going to different apps, everything comes to you inside this one place. Instagram becomes a feature inside it, not a separate thing you open. Same with Spotify, your bank, your calendar. All of it just lives in one place that's built around you.

The companies that will run all of this? Probably OpenAI or Anthropic. Whoever controls the intelligence that powers it, controls everything built on top of it.

And in that world, knowing how to code won't be the thing that makes you valuable. The idea will be. The judgment of what to build and for who, that becomes the rare skill.

But Honestly? It Could Also Be Nothing

Remember NFTs? Remember when the metaverse was going to be where we all lived and worked and hung out? Everyone jumped on it, billions went in, and then it just quietly became a joke. There's a real history of tech doing this — everyone gets excited about the next big thing, it turns out to be way overhyped, and we move on like it never happened.

AI could go the same way. Maybe the costs never come down enough. Maybe people don't actually want one app for everything. Maybe something breaks that nobody predicted.

Time will tell on all of this.

What i do know is that the Zuckerberg question is worth thinking about. The next person who changes the world probably won't be the best coder. They'll be the person with the best idea who happens to know what to build and why.

The club didn't open up. It just stopped asking for the same password.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." — Charles Dickens

Don't quote me on this, Udaysinh

Note: This essay represents my personal thoughts and speculations. AI assistance was used to refine grammar and spelling, but all opinions, arguments, and perspectives are entirely my own.

I wanted to write about this for a long time. Just to start: my political stance is "I am neither left wing nor right wing and don't specifically support any political party." I've always looked out for the best possible scenario for the human race and the people of my country. I wanted to clear that up so nobody thinks i'm biased.

Things started when i was in 1st or 2nd grade and touched an Android phone for the first time, amazed that i could use it to do so many things. I've always been a curious person who liked to tinker and understand how things work. I've been an Android fanboy to say the least — Android is something i've stood by and watched shift into the thing it is today.

In August 2025 Google announced a major change. Starting in 2026 (trials from October 2025), every Android phone will check an app's developer identity before installing it. Google compares it to an "ID check at the airport" and frames it as a security measure, pointing to data showing over 50× more malware from unverified APKs than from Play Store installs. In practice, sideloaded apps will require verification.

The Security Argument — Does It Hold Up?

Let me be clear: I understand why Google is doing this. The security argument makes sense on paper — fraudsters trick people into installing fake banking apps, and real identities attached to apps would (theoretically) create accountability.

But here's where i start having problems. The assumption is that verification equals safety, and that's just... not true? Scammers can and will buy verified developer accounts. A $25 registration fee isn't going to stop organized crime or state-sponsored actors. What it will do is create barriers for hobbyists, students and indie developers — anyone who doesn't want to hand over their real-world identity just to test an app on a friend's phone.

The Death of Sideloading?

Critics fear this undermines the core openness of Android. Without sideloading, users lose the ability to install custom ROMs, beta apps, niche utilities or alternative stores like F-Droid.

This is personal for me because i've used F-Droid for years. I've installed custom ROMs, beta versions, experimental tools that would never make it to the Play Store. That's what made Android special — the freedom to do whatever you wanted with your device. And now that freedom is being taken away under the guise of "protection."

The 1984 Parallels

Orwell wrote, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." By analogy: if a smartphone can't install an app unless a central authority permits its developer, is that really freedom of choice?

And this is where it gets scary. Because once you establish the infrastructure for control, it doesn't matter what the original intention was. The capability exists, and it will be used. Maybe not today, maybe not by Google, but eventually by someone. Governments will demand backdoors. Corporations will demand compliance. And users will have no choice because the alternative — an uncertified device without Google services — is essentially unusable for most people.

The irony isn't lost on me. The EU is forcing Apple to open up while Google is voluntarily closing down. It's backwards. And it shows that this isn't about security at all — it's about control.

A Warning Sign Closer to Home

I've always supported the Digital India movement. Affordable internet from Jio, world-class infrastructure like UPI — genuinely transformative. That context matters before what comes next.

Recently India's telecom regulator ordered all new smartphones to ship with a government app, Sanchar Saathi, pre-installed — to curb SIM fraud and help track lost phones. Reasonable goals. But the initial mandate made the app undeletable, and privacy advocates warned it could turn every smartphone into "a vessel for state-mandated software that the user cannot remove." After backlash the government walked it back and made it optional.

But the episode revealed a tension we can't ignore: if governments can compel app installs in the first place, and Google is simultaneously enforcing app authorizations, how much control does the average user actually retain?

What This Means

Orwell's words echo: if the freedom to add and control our own software is curtailed, do we still have freedom at all in the digital realm? I think the answer is pretty clear. We're witnessing the death of digital freedom, one security update at a time. And the worst part is that most people won't even notice until it's too late.

I don't have a solution. I wish i did. Maybe it's supporting alternatives like GrapheneOS or /e/OS. Maybe it's fighting for right-to-repair and right-to-modify legislation. Maybe it's just being aware and vocal. But what i do know is that we can't just accept this as inevitable. The freedom to control our own devices is too important to give up without a fight.

Note: This essay represents my personal thoughts. AI assistance was used to refine grammar and spelling, but all opinions and arguments are entirely my own.

She makes some solid points about how "Art has always been personal—a means for humans to express love, pain, curiosity, or hope" and questions whether "something created by a machine ever carry such weight?" But the more I think about it, the more I feel like we might be approaching this whole thing from the wrong angle.

What Actually Counts as Art?

Oxford says art is "the use of the imagination to express ideas or feelings, particularly in painting, drawing or sculpture." Cool, but my definition is way simpler — art is anything that makes you stop and feel something. Could be a song that hits just right, a movie scene that sticks with you, or even a really clever meme that makes you laugh.

I've been moved by stuff that definitely wasn't hanging in a gallery. Sometimes it's just about the moment, not the medium. I have an Instagram page where I post photos I took from my camera, which are the definition of art to me — I talked about it in my previous essay.

The Whole Evolution Thing

Sanjana talks about how human-made art is charged with layers of experience: a memory of a lost loved one, a struggle against injustice, the joy of seeing sunlight reflect on water. She's absolutely right about that emotional weight being important. But then she mentions how "Most AI art tends to be uncanny: too perfect, too symmetrical, too much like an echo rather than a voice."

Here's where I think differently — every new art form goes through this phase. When photography showed up, painters probably said the same thing. "It's too mechanical, where's the human touch?" Now we don't question whether photographers are artists.

It's All About the Story

What really stuck with me is when she says "Many people still crave a backstory—an artist with hopes and flaws, a life lived" and that "AI-generated pictures sometimes feel like photographs of emotions, not the actual feelings themselves."

She's hitting on something real here. We don't just want pretty things — we want to connect with the person behind them. But maybe that story doesn't have to end with someone holding a paintbrush. Maybe it's about someone spending weeks figuring out how to make AI understand their vision, iterating through hundreds of attempts to get something that captures what they're feeling.

The Collaboration Angle

Sanjana mentions how "Some artists now use AI as a creative partner" and that "The results can be genuinely exciting: hybrids of human imagination and technological possibility." This is where I think things get interesting. It's not about AI replacing human creativity — it's about expanding what's possible.

When she says "Human art is messy, contradictory, and unpredictable — qualities that algorithms struggle to reproduce," I think she's right about current AI. But humans working with AI? That combo can be just as messy and unpredictable as anything else.

People's Real Reactions

Something that caught my attention is how studies show that when people judge artworks without knowing where they came from, AI images are sometimes preferred for their aesthetic qualities — but when viewers learn that an image was made by a computer, many admit to feeling a disconnect.

This is wild to me. If something moves you before you know how it was made, why should the method change that feeling? It's like finding out your favorite song was recorded digitally instead of on analog equipment — the song didn't change, just your perception of it.

How We Got Here (And Where We're Going)

Looking back, it's crazy how fast this whole AI art thing evolved. A few years ago, if you wanted AI to make something artistic, you'd get these weird, distorted nightmare-fuel images that looked like someone melted a photo. Remember those early deepfake fails? Yeah, not exactly gallery material.

Then around 2021, things started getting interesting. DALL·E showed up and suddenly people could type "a cat wearing an astronaut helmet in space"

and get something that actually looked decent. But it was still pretty limited — you had to get on a waitlist, the images were tiny, and most of them still had that "AI generated" vibe.

Fast forward to 2022 and boom — Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL·E 2 all hit the scene. Suddenly everyone and their mom was creating insanely detailed, almost photo-realistic images. I remember scrolling through Twitter and seeing art that made me do a double-take, only to find out it was made in like 30 seconds with a text prompt.

Now we're at a point where the quality is so good that sometimes you literally can't tell the difference. And the tools keep getting better — video generation, 3D models, music composition, the whole deal.

But here's what I think the future looks like: it's not going to be about AI vs humans anymore. It's going to be about new kinds of artists who understand both the human side and the tech side. People who can take their personal experiences and translate them through these tools in ways we haven't seen before. Think less "robot replacement" and more "new paintbrush."

My Honest Take

I'm not trying to argue that AI art is better than human art or anything like that. What Sanjana says about human experience and emotion bringing something irreplaceable to art is completely valid. Van Gogh's story absolutely makes "Starry Night" more powerful.

But I think art is bigger than any one method. If something makes you think, feel, or see the world differently, that matters regardless of how it was created. When Sanjana asks whether the future of creativity will be a blend of human passion and machine skill, or whether people will cling to art as a distinctly human realm, I say why not both?

Some people will always want that purely human connection, and that's great. Others will be open to new forms of expression. And some will find ways to blend everything together in ways we haven't even imagined yet.

Bottom Line

Art isn't disappearing — it's just getting more options. And honestly, in a world where more people than ever can create and share their ideas, that feels pretty exciting to me.

Anyway, that's my take. Art's evolving, and I'm here for it.

Peace out, Udaysinh

Credits: Sanjana

P.S. — Sanjana, you really made me overthink this at 2 AM. Thanks for that.

"Why are you wasting time playing games? If you're already so good at playing, why not learn how to make them?"

It felt like he expected me to quit gaming and miraculously become a tech genius overnight. Only in an Indian home does nagging come with free life advice — and that offhand comment sparked my programming journey.

For the past six or seven years (yes, I counted), I've been buried in code and late-night study sessions. I didn't have many friends IRL — my social calendar was as empty as my bank account after a tech conference. Whenever I got a spare minute, you could bet I was either hiding behind a controller or buried in code.

School was a nightmare due to bullying, and the pressure from my parents only made it worse with their relentless (if well-meaning) encouragement. Before college, my days ran on autopilot: nine hours of classes, two hours of tuition, then straight into the study→dinner→sleep vortex. Friendships? They were nearly non-existent. Somewhere along the way, I began to appreciate solitude, finding comfort in being alone. Depression crept in so quietly I didn't notice until its weight became as familiar as a heavy blanket I couldn't remember not carrying. (More on this some other day.)

During my first semester of college, I made one of the hardest decisions I've ever faced: I hit pause on coding — the only thing I had going for me. With the relentless academic grind frying my brain, stepping away felt like losing my safety net. It was like taking a perfectly timed Netflix break at an Indian family wedding.

Imagine someone who hadn't had a genuine in-person conversation in two years — thanks to COVID and the pressures of JEE — suddenly being forced into natural, real-life interaction. That was me in those early college days. I even pretended to be extroverted just to avoid falling into a deep no-friend void. (Don't ask how many conversations I managed to mess up during those first few weeks.)

During this break, I worked hard on my social skills, made some friends, and started gaming purely for fun instead of stress relief. I also discovered a new passion: capturing moments with my camera, experimenting with film direction, and developing a keen taste in movies. Believe it or not, I now code for about four hours after college (mostly late at night, with a messed-up sleep schedule and an even worse addiction to caffeine).

Stepping away from the screen had its merits. In that break, I finally confronted the depression that had shadowed my teen years — a silent burden I had never shared, not even with my parents. The weight of those lost years slowly lifted, revealing that procrastination isn't always a weakness; sometimes, it's the universe's way of urging you to pause and recharge. Who knew a single break could spark such a productive comeback? Today, I'm a completely different person than I was just a year and six months ago.

So if you were expecting a tale of regret or an endless list of "should-haves," think again. Life's been pretty good, and while my Indian parents may still nag about my "waste of time," I've learned that sometimes procrastination is just the universe's way of telling you to recharge. Cheers to taking breaks, laughing at life, and coding again — with a few extra friends to share the wins (and losses). After all, it's all about a balanced life.

"You do it to yourself, you do And that's what really hurts." — Radiohead

Cheers, Udaysinh

I am thrilled to share my first post on this website. As a software developer and AI engineer, I have always been fascinated by the endless possibilities that technology offers. This site is a culmination of my experiences, skills, and aspirations, and I'm excited to embark on this new journey of sharing my knowledge and ideas.

Why I Created This

Over the years, I've had the privilege of working on various projects, from developing custom software solutions to founding a startup. My journey has been filled with learning, innovation, and collaboration. This site is a place where I can document my experiences, share insights, and connect with like-minded people.

My Vision

I envision this as a hub for anyone interested in AI, cybersecurity, and web development. Here, I'll be sharing:

• Technical writing — guides on programming, AI models and web development.
• Project highlights — detailed breakdowns of the things I build.
• Industry thoughts — my take on the latest trends and shifts in technology.
• Personal experiences — stories from my journey as a freelancer, founder and perpetual learner.

My Journey So Far

From creating custom software to managing a team at Citta Hub, I've gained experience that I'm eager to share. My background in Computer Science Engineering and a habit of continuous learning have given me a versatile skill set I'm excited to put to work here.

Join Me

Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, I hope to share something that inspires and educates. Feel free to reach out and engage. Together, let's explore the fascinating world of technology.

Thank you for visiting — more soon.

Best regards, Udaysinh Sapate