Two weeks ago I built an Android application with voice commands while running around an athletic track in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium in London. So when I decided to try building a web app en route to a big group weekend away, it did not feel as far fetched as it once would have. The first commit went in from the Eurostar terminal, before I had boarded. I did not have a laptop, and was going to have to do the whole build with just my phone. Recent hackathons, and a few sites of my own, had taught me what works and what does not, and importantly what I could accomplish with just my phone. The build ran on the train until the channel tunnel killed the connection, and I picked it back up on the Métro in Paris. The only real time I needed to stop was to arrange the Cloudflare access the agent needed. Before walking to my hotel I sat down on the Métro platform to run through the online setup, because it was fiddly, and the Métro had been extremely hot the whole way so far. After this I could let it start building reusing methods for setup from previous projects and my existing domain to get a useable subdomain. ...

I have been building locally with AI over the past year and I wanted to start moving what I had truly online. Taking something from prototype to hosted is normal work in my day to day. Doing it with no platform team behind me is a different story, because everything that machine had been covering for was suddenly mine to build. Your machine in every case, is the boundary. On your own laptop you’re the whole system whether you meant to be or not, it’s your logins, network and various local dependencies. Point a public URL at the same code and it’s doubtful to work (well safely). In a company a separate team is usually overseeing the security model and the various components. ...

Most migrations don’t start because someone planned one, they start because half the organisation is already using something unsanctioned and you’re formalising it before it turns into a compliance problem. I’ve seen that across different types of tech, and the failure mode is always the same: the pilot gets all the investment and the rollout gets whatever’s left, which is usually not much. That gap is the rollout version of the question I came back to in Better Than What It Replaces: is the new thing actually better for the person who has to use it? ...

I’m not a web developer I’m a senior technical architect and my day job is application compatibility, migration, and platform modernisation, figuring out why software breaks when you move it between platforms and fixing it. The tools I reach for are Sysinternals, WinDbg, and Process Hacker, not CSS and JavaScript. Building a website from scratch wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse. I’ve wanted a personal site for years but kept putting it off because I didn’t want something that looked like it was built in 2003 on GeoCities (though I do miss the flame borders). I also didn’t want to just use Squarespace or WordPress because I wanted to understand the build. When I moved into a strategy role last year where thought leadership is actually part of the job, the timing finally made sense. AI tools had collapsed the barrier too. What would have taken me weeks of learning web development took about two weeks of evenings and weekends. ...

kashifnazir.com is the first public build of my personal site: Hugo, PaperMod, GitHub Pages, and a lot of iterative work with Claude and Codex to get it from generic template to something that actually feels like mine. The project is really two things at once: a live site and a record of how it was built. That includes the design direction, the circuit motif, the decision to launch on GitHub Pages first, and the AWS architecture I deliberately chose not to build yet. ...