Hello

Hey! Hello everyone. This is my first ever blog post on my own website, just testing things out.

See, I can type in basic markdown i.e. bold, italics, and less more. I bet it supports more features, that I just need to lookup.

This website had a long journey from it’s very first implementation in plain html/css/js, after which I hit the limits of traditional web. No components, no fancy plugins to speed things up, and a lot of work. Then I rewrote everything in Vue, eventually Nuxt.js. It was all smooth, until Nuxt felt a little out of my reach due to occasional TS errors and old version of tailwind.

I eventually decided to not use Nuxt anymore. I think it might get better in future.

Now I started the search for the best framework for personal websites (this blog wasn’t on my mind back then!). I obviously didn’t want to use NextJS overkill for this simple site, and after dogging SvelteKit (although I did use SvelteKit for another project), I landed on Astro.

Astro is the best framework for these kind of content driven websites, and thus I also decided to make a blog on here (thanks astro!). It provides automatic Image optimizations, content collections, and much more out of the box.

So who are you?

Enough about Astro, let’s talk about me. I am Harsh Narayan Jha, currently (at least as of today) a student of B.Tech in Computer Science at BIT. I love building things and making them work, whether it be Apps, Games, Websites, Videos and more. I also like studying about Computers, Operating Systems and Hardware/Software in general. You can see here that I have made a lot of these.

It all started with Python and my decades-old Dell Inspiron 1012 Mini running Windows XP I used to use. Although I remember writing windows batch scripts before that, but no evidence of that is left. Then I slowly started to explore more and more computer stuff, and I eventually started making things that worked. The best way for me to learn programming was not by following any details lectures or long playlists, but by actually making stuff that solved real world problems I faced (Don’t misunderstand it, I did read a lot of articles and watched a lot and lots of videos).

Open Source and Git

Then at some point I stepped into the open source world, and begin to actually contribute to the OSS world. My first git experience was when I contributed to the Unity’s Open Project Chop Chop, I made so many mistakes, but that led me to learn git the hard way.

No matter where you work, they will always use some kind of version control system, to prevent your coworkers from stepping on each other’s toes. And git is the best one out there. You must learn git eventually.

Enter Linux

I switched over to an HP Envy Laptop, since the old Dell one was getting too old, along with the OS. The new one ran Windows 8.1, which is in my opinion, the best modern version of windows. This laptop let me run Android Studio, and I can make mobile apps finally 🎉.

The laptop was still relatively old, running a 4th gen Intel in mid 2021. And it showed it limits when I tried to run certain games on it. From sometime now, I kept reading about Linux and how performant it is, apart from being privacy friendly and all.

I decided to try it. Ubuntu, the linux entry-point for most of us, was awesome. I took no time in dual booting it alongside windows, and then from booting linux occasionally, I found myself booting windows occasionally.

After being on Ubuntu for years until I got my new laptop from the college, an HP Probook, I tried KDE Plasma instead of Ubuntu for a change, specifically Garuda Linux. KDE has a lot of customizations, and I loved it.

Today I use Hyprland on Arch Linux, due to which I lost almost all of the built-in features that a DE provided and had to write scripts for everything, but it’s fun 😅.

What’s Next

I will occasionally write posts here, and there will be a snippets section, where I will share short code snippets in various contexts. You can see all of my posts and snippets, or read more about me.

Please checkout the latest projects on my GitHub.