Starting over

I tore down the old site today.

For years karndeep.me was a single page. My name, two buttons, a LinkedIn link. A business card pretending to be a website. Functional, but nothing lived there.

This is a place to think out loud.

Why plain

The internet has gotten loud. Every publishing platform wants to decorate your sentences. Suggest tags. Summon a thumbnail. Quiz you on whether your headline is engaging enough. I wanted a place where the only thing on the page is the thing I wrote.

Black text. White paper. A serif for reading, a sans for navigating. That is the entire design system. If a design choice cannot survive being described in two lines, it probably has no business being on the page.

Why build it

Substack, Medium, Ghost. All fine. All also someone else's shop.

If I am going to build the habit of writing, I want the habit to live on a thing I own, on a domain I keep, in a format I can carry away in ten seconds. Markdown files on disk. That is it. No database, no admin theme marketplace, no "AI enhancements" trying to autocomplete my adjectives.

The whole engine is a few hundred lines of PHP. You could read it in an evening. If it breaks, I can fix it. If I ever abandon it, nothing gets orphaned. The posts are still plain text files in a folder.

How it is put together

For anyone curious:

• Flat files. Each post is one Markdown file with a JSON header. No MySQL.
• bcrypt for the admin password. Session cookies marked HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Strict.
• Rate-limited login. Five bad attempts from an IP and it locks for fifteen minutes.
• CSRF tokens on every form.
• User data lives outside the document root, so an Apache config typo can never spill it.
• A Content-Security-Policy that says: scripts and images from this origin, fonts from Google, nothing else.

Deliberately boring. Boring is the point.

What comes next

I do not know yet. Probably notes on whatever I am working on. Finance. Hong Kong. Things I am reading. Occasional code. Shorter pieces more often, rather than one polished essay every six months that never quite ships.

If you are here, thanks. Come back in a couple of weeks and see what has accumulated.

K.