Rationale

I just graduated from university and have done quite a few interesting projects either from coursework, Monash Motorsport, or my internship with AIDrivers. However, I didn’t have a place to really showcase these projects and document my thought process. With GitHub Pages building a portfolio website is extremely easy and just by following their guide you can get up and running super quickly without any knowledge on HTML, CSS and Jekyll.

However, GitHub pages limits the Jekyll plugins to this list which isn’t ideal. Furthermore, many themes are overly styled and the focus is not on the content & writing. With some luck, I chanced upon this blog and loved how simple and minimal it was, with the main focus being technical writing instead of flashy visuals. I wanted to explore building the site to have full customization options.

Building the site

Taking a lot of inspiration from that blog, I built the base of my website which uses KaTeX for LaTeX rendering, and uses nothing but HTML, CSS and Jekyll. I soon realized that I may want to include references through jekyll-scholar on project or blog posts, but this Jekyll plugin was not officially supported. Being a cheapskate, I didn’t want to pay for hosting etc so I was determined to use GitHub for hosting.

Through this suggestion, I managed to find a guide on building the website locally and deploying it automatically with the help of GitHub Actions. (I’ve documented the process and necessary tweaks in this blog post) It was rather tedious and I managed to set it up, but this has allowed full customization and is fully customizable. Additionally I had to revisit how to build & publish Docker images to Docker Hub, and learnt how to deploy with GitHub Actions.

All code for this website can be found in this repository.