Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi I'm Nikhil! I grew up the UAE and came to the United States for college and graduated with a degree in biomedical engineering. I worked in academia and industry for about 15 years before deciding to turn my attention and energies towards problems in healthcare. I'm now a graduate student at Columbia University's Medical Center and am studying clinical informatics and loving the magnificent beehive that is New York City. With the time I have, I love going to art museums, practicing calligraphy, reading short stories and graphic novels, and watching every suspense/mystery show or movie I can (huge fan of the genre; for example I've watched all of Columbo at least three times). I'm also trying to learn CAD and have 3D printed several small abominations.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started blogging around 2003 after discovering blogs like Kottke.org, Jeffrey Zeldman's blog, Greg Storey's Airbag.ca, and Todd Dominey's WhatDoIKnow.org. My first blog was at freeorange.net which I now use as a placeholder for my tiny LLC's future site.

I used to live in Ames, Iowa at the time and decided to and blog what I knew, about stuff going on in the town: gossip, lectures and shows I'd attended, photos of random scenes and events, and so on. That last part proved to be great: I'd hear from a quite a few alumni or former residents who'd have photo requests for nostalgia and I'd gladly oblige, especially since I was super excited to use my first digital camera, a whopping 5 megapixel Sony DSC-F717 😊

I then stopped blogging for about 10 or so years and resumed in 2018. My current blog is essentially a freeform dump: just this mélange of stuff I find interesting and/or may want to reference later. There's really no audience in mind. I use a lot of tags on my posts and am often delighted by exploring them a while later. I moved all my bookmarks over from PinBoard (an excellent service) and am trying to get off Instagram. I'm also trying to be better about making and sharing things (photos, calligraphy, art) no matter how terrible they are and not just consuming them.

As for the name, I really wanted a domain hack, www.nikh.il, but this sadly required permission from the Israeli government I was pretty sure I wouldn't get 😅 So I went with the shortest and 'coolest' TLD I could find and ended up with nikhil.io. I also have nikhil.fish as an alias for no reason.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I think half my site's half a a tumblelog. As for the other half, I have a Markdown file called log.md in my iCloud Drive that I dump inchoate thoughts into (it's at about half a meg right now). I also use the excellent Things app on my phone to save blog posts, names, recommendations, articles, and media of interest to peruse later. When I have time, I look at these two sources to post and comment on something I think is beautiful, interesting, or funny.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

All professional creatives I know personally have a space that they attend to do their work and they have told me that this matters immensely to them. In my case, I have a setup I've used reliably over many years and love it. I especially love my sit-to-stand desk (on wheels), giant display, and clickity-clack keyboard. I always listen to ambient music or white noise while working on anything (Loscil's works are a favorite).

I've found that I just cannot focus in coffeehouses or libraries. And I absolutely cannot work or think in harsh "cool white" lighting (3000K or lower; if you need me to divulge secrets, just put me in a room with two tubelights for thirty seconds). I know a lot of people (like my wife, a writer) who can work anywhere and may be a bit envious. I am also in the habit of pacing around and muttering things to myself while working and these are not nice things to do at coffeehouses or libraries.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I write all my posts in Markdown and use an old and heavily modded version of 11ty.js with several Markdown-it plugins and supported by quite a few bash and Node scripts to generate the HTML pages. Images are processed with Sharp. The blog theme is a mess of TSX and SASS files. All posts and code are in git and Github. I build everything on my laptop and sync all the files to an S3 bucket that serves my blog through CloudFront.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Not really. I've spent enough time monkeying with the design/structure and code where my setup fits my needs like a bespoke suit. You can always nerd out over tooling, and it's a lot of fun, but I've suspended that in favor of using the tools. For the time being at least 😅

Now if my wife or a friend were starting a blog, I would absolutely recommend a platform like Bear. Anything simple, hosted, not creepy, and not run by greedy and/or awful people.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

It costs ~$5 a month. A giant part of that cost is the domain name. Zero revenue. No plans on 'growing' it or whatever; it's just my little garden on the internet.

I have no problem with people monetising their blogs as long as the strategy they employ is respectful to visitors' privacy and unobtrusive to their experience. Patronage/memberships aside, The Deck comes to mind as an ad platform that achieved both these things very well.

I do have my problems with platforms like Substack and might write a blog post about this later.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Please interview Chris Glass! His lovely and popular blog is a huge inspiration for mine, layout and content, and he's been at it since at least 2003 IIRC. Another old favorite is Witold Riedel's log. I'm also really digging this blog I discovered recently.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I just put up a small project I've wanted to do for a while, my own little curated digital gallery of art I've loved over the years. It was mostly a design exercise but I thought I might use some LLM to discover some themes in why I love these works (or maybe you just love looking at things and don't really need to understand why).

Other than that, I am so happy with what feels to me like a resurgence in personal blogging (here's a recent index of personal blogs from readers of HackerNews). Thank you for having me in your beautiful space and featuring several other lovely and interesting people! This is a fantastic project Manu 🤗