Building This Site

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. ...

March 22, 2026 · 7 min · Kashif Nazir

Building kashifnazir.com

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. ...

March 9, 2026 · 1 min · Kashif Nazir