My latest project: this portfolio website

Before we begin with a little history, here is a mind-map drawn with Excalibur+. And a word of advice, this current blog that you are reading (or any of my other blogs or Substacks) have no piece of the writing 'halucinated' by AI. This is all me, in my highs and lows.

History

Nothing as much, I cover most of this when I started my Substack that is now 11 whole stacks old. After days of idling between my bad Google Sites site template and then the boxy Notion work portfolio, I got v0 by Vercel premium, Gemini (free-d by my student id) and Claude to design this site that you are reading this post on right now.

Domain

I always thought sure I could buy a domain, but making the whole website by myself is a big project, and seemed like a big project. Until GenAI came to our lives with DALL-E first, and I used to create abstract Dali art, well before ChatGPT came in and AI/GenAI/AgenticAI entered our everyday lexicon.

Using Claude Pro/Code to built a website that I fed my Notion site was very painful and it exhausted my friend Ansh's Claude credits for a few hours and built me something in HTML that a 5th grader could code. But then in another hang with my brilliant friends (thank you Ayush) he said just buy on Cloudflare or GoDaddy and get Vercel to host it via GitHub.

So, on I went to Cloudflare, and the domain I wanted hrishikayshap.com and not hrishikeshkayshap.com which is just too long was listed for $9.99 a year. I did that and not only did Cloudflare allow me GitHub hosting with a few clicks, it connected with v0 by Vercel. I apologize if I am making it sound like this while thing was a big chore or a big deal, it was not and the entire thing was very easy and you can ask your friendly-neighbourhood-spiderman-AIChatBox to give you a step by step rundown of this whole thing.

Letting v0 by Vercel do its magic

Since I had already built the Notion portfolio site from years ago and always added new stuff up front here and there. V0 took that site as a base, gave me a few template options for the site design, went for Gold-White-and-Black, and it did the rest. It truly pulled my components and it made my site, created the GitHub repository and deployed this site.

The Architecture

After the initial built was done in a day, I kept some time aside every weekend and the rest of the architecture was sorted out pretty easily. Look at this simple draw I made using ExcaliburDraw+, explains every single thing without much hullabaloo:

Now, this is the abomination (okay, exaggeration but does not do a good job of explaining the architecture IMO) that Gemini Pro generated:

For your writing and for your grand explanations in chart form (see: Aliens meme from It's Always Sunny), I believe old school may be the way in the age of AI slop.

Setting up your email-subscriber-contact loop

Thank you friendly-neighbourhood-chatbox for again finding me the best option out there for portfolio sites.

Re-send was god-send.

Resend got me setup fast and quick with a few clicks as it connected to my site via Vercel and GitHub and my mailing list and subscribing lists were also set up in no time. Go ahead and sign up here. I promise to keep my emails to once a year or at max twice a year.

Quick notes on what I learnt through this

1. AI is here to stay.
2. AI will take your job if your job is operator-only.
3. You need to be able to be a AI-operator while being the somebody that thinks and plans.
4. AI would not or RATHER SHOULD NOT take away the writer's job or the artist's job no matter how much you'd think AI is getting great at it.
5. Part life advice part life experience somehow linked with building my work portfolio this late is of never getting too comfortable with anything in life and this applies to especially now in the age of AgenticAI and the daily advancements that Claude and others seem to be making.
6. This is a new age and it's the do-ers who will find their way through this and it does not matter if you are a coder, a manager, a consultant or a poet, do your craft and do it good.

What I Learned (re: this field)

1. v0 is genuinely game-changing for UI work. It doesn't replace designers, it amplifies them.
2. Design tokens + Tailwind = the perfect balance of consistency and speed.
3. Edges matter. Serving from 200+ locations worldwide makes a noticeable difference.
4. Blog-as-data (TypeScript objects instead of a CMS) is actually simpler for small projects.
5. The best personal website is one you'll actually maintain and iterate on.

What next?

I am heading to Yale SOM and will be based out of San Francisco for a month starting 19th of July 2026. Hit me up if you want to chat all things health-tech including the potential of a full-stack EMR system for India and other developing countries.

You can also DM me on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) or Instagram if you want to explore the SF Art Scene, go on hikes, go to OutsideLands or just meet for coffee/pickleball/paddle.

Stay in the loop. I am going to be pushing a once a year email to all the subscribers to my mailing list. Sign-up for my mailing list here.

xoxo - Hrishi

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