Akshat Sharma

January 2025 - Updates

Updated on
Tagged as {site update, journal}

Stock image displaying a laptop with computer source code and background imagery contrasting a service outage and recovery with storm clouds and white fluffy ones

Personal updates

It has been eight years since I last published anything here. Of these eight, I spent seven years at NerdWallet.com. And then I decided to take a gap year to focus on my health, both physical and mental. It was glorious. Now with 2025 starting, here's to new beginnings. Happy new year everybody! It promises to be a great one šŸŒ….

Site update for 2025

I recently noticed the site looking odd. Particularly the home page and the attributions page were broken (the first one visually, and the second one functionally). I suspect I was using some partially supported CSS syntax which is no longer supported.

Normally I would dig into it and find out exactly what went wrong and fix it. However, I have slowly been fleshing out Patrikā with more features, and I use my own homepage as the test data. I decided that the currently experimental version of the home page is now good enough to be the prod version. And so here we are, with the site rendered entirely by Patrikā without any external rendering frameworks. Patrikā is now framework agnostic which means you can use Pequeno, React, Pug, or hand rolled JS. And it has a live reloading server. I'll publish a full post about Patrikā soon.

What's missing from the site now?

There are two regressions which need more features in Patrikā.

  1. The attributions page - I intend to add the ability to link data files (yaml / json etc.) through front matter. Once that is done, the attributions page will be back up.
  2. The RSS feed - The RSS feed has been missing ever since the last update (when I switched from Jekyll to Pequeno). I need to put some thought into how best to enable it with Patrikā
  3. Image management - I need to implement a system to automatically compress and resize my images. And to replace <img/> tags with <picture/>.

The biggest challenge has not been implementing features, but designing the API. I don't want Patrikā to be another "opinionated" framework. I want it to be a fun experience for people who like writing code and have their own opinions. At the same time, it should not be too intimidating for someone to just pick up and start using. So a bit of tight roping at the moment, but we'll get there.