Hello, I'm Shardul. This is where I write about things I'm working through, building, or just thinking about.
What This Is
I've been putting off starting a blog for years because the thought of maintaining yet another thing felt exhausting. But here's what changed: I realized I was already documenting everything anyway. Notes scattered across markdown files, configuration comments that turned into essays, commit messages that explained entire architectural decisions. I was writing, just not publishing.
So this blog is less about creating content and more about making public what I'm already doing privately. Learning in public, as they say, though I prefer to think of it as just being honest about the process.
What You'll Find Here
Technical deep dives when I fall down rabbit holes. Stories about projects that probably took longer than they should have. Thoughts on developer experience, infrastructure, and why I care so much about making my tools work exactly the way I want them to. Maybe some photography stuff too, because that's the other thing I do when I'm not staring at a terminal.
I'm not interested in writing tutorials that already exist everywhere else. If I write about Docker or Linux or whatever, it'll be because I hit something weird, learned something non-obvious, or have a perspective that's actually mine.
The Technical Details
This website is built with pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript because I wanted to understand every piece of it. No frameworks, no build steps I don't control, no magic. It's themed in Tokyo Night (obviously), renders markdown into these pages, and runs on my own infrastructure. The whole thing is probably over-engineered for what it is, but that's kind of the point.
I believe in owning your tools, understanding your stack, and being willing to build things from scratch when the existing solutions don't quite fit. This blog is an extension of that philosophy.
Why Now
I've been working on some projects lately that felt worth documenting. The Arch Linux ARM setup on my ThinkPad X13s. The dotfiles management system that syncs across my devices. The HomeLab that keeps growing in scope. The configurations that I spend way too much time perfecting.
These things taught me more than I expected, took longer than they should have, and made me question my life choices more than once. That seems worth sharing.
Let's See Where This Goes
I don't know how often I'll write. I'm not going to promise weekly posts or stick to a schedule because that's how blogs die. I'll write when I have something to say that feels worth saying. Maybe that's once a week, maybe it's once a month. We'll see.
If you're here, thanks for reading. If you want to reach out about something I wrote, please do. I'm always up for talking about this stuff with people who actually care about it.
Published: November 22, 2025