Github-Pages

I’m recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time right now, so when I decided to build a personal site the temptation to go straight to Route53, CloudFront, S3, and Terraform was real. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini what they thought before starting, and while they disagreed on a few things they all said to use GitHub Pages and not overthink the hosting. Gemini included a cost comparison that had an EKS cluster as one of the options at £150-200/month, which is overkill for basically any website, but it helped make the point that GitHub Pages with a custom domain was the obvious starting point. I could have spent weeks on infrastructure before writing a single post, or I could just start writing. ...

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. ...