Design &
Technology

The Story of Reflection

Reflection began on a blind Hashnode page, just to spill my thoughts in a place. You can still find my very first post here. After hitting “publish,” the itch for personalization kicked me hard. Hashnode’s free tier quadrails stopped me cold. Then I thought: maybe I should switch. Yes. But where to? I asked Perplexity; it suggested Jekyll and Hugo. I’d already sinned with ten Hugo blogs back in my Windows era, so Jekyll felt like the lesser evil.

Jekyll is built on Ruby, you like it if you speak fluent Gemfile. I don’t. Two days of hit-and-trial with custom layouts and themes ended in a beautiful, broken ghost town. Built my own theme, still failed.

Back to Hugo. Same wall, same bruise. Except this theme, hugo-texify3, wouldn’t leave my head. So I cloned the design partially, built purely on vanilla JS from scratch, async everything, tailor-made for my needs. Code lives here.

Last itch: diagrams. Excalidraw is my comfort, but it doesn't support EB Garamond. Fork, inject font, Docker-wrap, deploy on the Pi, classic yak shave. By the time the container came to life, I realized draw.io would’ve finished the job in five minutes. That's my friends "the story of how I started Reflection".

About the Author

The Author of the blog, is a person called Amal Satheesan. He is already suffocated by the idea of sharing his taste in public. OSINT. I try my max to yap my phone and give little attention to it.

It would feel pathetic if I share more info about me. There's nothing to share. [post 20 November, 2025 | 22:54:41 IST]

• satheesanamal6@gmail.com
• GitHub @kutt27
• LinkedIn