Inception
My first introduction to HTML was during the school days when I was 11 years old (early high school, 2006) via the academic computer book. People from a CBSE background may vaguely remember that the first part of the book was dedicated to the basics of decision-making and an introduction to programming using C. (Surprising? Yes, I too feel the same while jotting it down.)
I picked up HTML mainly because it required very little setup and gave quick visual feedback (the dopamine hit!). This continued and slowly I got to know about CSS and shipped my first multi page website as a IP project in 2008. Fast forward 2012, I got to know about Flipkart and little did I know that this will prove to be a vital turning point of my life.
Flipkart’s book section enlightened me and paved the way for further exploration which was not available locally
Based on the reviews, I picked up a set of books and began my web development journey. The book on Data Structure Through C in Depth is still with me and it’s one of the best beginner books out there. Since my understanding of the potential of the C language wasn’t very solid, I moved on with web development.
Past
I deployed multiple revisions of my website with the domain ashokdey.in since the mid of 2015. Before that I used to find free hosting which were generally bloated with free ads!! But it was a good tradeoff for the CPanel learnings I gained over the years. Learning though the capabilities of HTML 5 (in 2012 in India) and experimenting with different browsers and their quirks was incredibly exciting and satisfying.
I used to play a lot with PHP and MySQL on my local machine and enjoyed the 360p videos of the thenewboston, Derek Banas & Alex. Those 360p videos were absolute gold mines back in early 2013.
Website Timeline
- 2015: Self designed in Photoshop CS14 and paired with the domain from BigRock. Preview
- 2016: A slight different design based on material & hosted on GitHub pages. Preview
- 2017: A really big project similar to Quora! Hosted at qurious.xyz [It’s no more… 😞 ]
- 2020: Updated my website again with a resume like format. Preview
- 2022: Just one liner. Preview
- 2023: Just the last recent version, inspired by the website of Robert Love. Preview
- 2025: The current version, website with blogs using Hexo and the Cactus theme.
About Qurious
A few words to honour my first big pet project name of which was already decided back in 2012!! I was a big fan of Yahoo Answers and always pondered building an interactive social website (yeah, inspired by Facebook but for Q&A). The work done on Qurious was solely the result of skimming through dozens of books and reading a lot of articles over the internet (most of which no more exists, but they are present in my Chrome bookmarks 😊).
Homepage of my first pet project, conceptualized, designed and developed by me - Qurious
Side-note: It also landed me to 3 internships which I later refused as they were non paid, too far from my place and were more than 6 months!! (today we call these Red Flags)
Present
A lot has changed since I last updated my website in 2023. Back then, I planned to set it up as a blog using Hugo and even published a few articles. But life moved fast and I was pulled towards new beginnings and responsibilities. My days used to be packed. With that I also moved to a new city and joined, Infocusp Innovations.
Infocusp was a risky bet considering my past experiences, it was a completely new trajectory, but to my relief it turned out to be one of the best decisions. The environment at Infocusp is incredibly human-first, hybrid, flexible, flat in structure, and filled with amazing people. The work has global impact and gives me the freedom to explore a diverse set of technology domains.
So during March of 2025, I was exploring Envoy and I stumbled upon the website of Matt Klein, the creator of Envoy. That instantly reignited the itch to revive my blog. Fast forward June 2025, I’m happy to share that the blog is finally back. I am writing this article just after the initial setup, even before thinking about the deployment. The current website is based on Hexo using the Cactus theme.
Deployment: The website is deployed on Cloudflare Pages via GitHub. The steps are super simple and pushing updates are just a commit away
Next up: I plan to consolidate all my scattered blog posts from across the internet right here.
Future
Right now, I’m not thinking about redesigning or switching frameworks anymore. My main goal is to build the habit of publishing new articles consistently, ideally once a month. Let’s see what the future holds..
Thanks for reading until the end!