Projects: Kash Projects

7/22/26

While Kash Projects is not my first project, it is my first project after graduating. It's certainly strange developing and writing something knowing it won't have an arbitrary grade attatched to it, or specific parameters that need to be abided by. Instead, it's all at my leisure, with what I am willing to do.

There wasn't really anything crazy that inspired me to create this. The idea came to me one day sitting in class and seeing my math professor showcase his business site, he was trying to access his 3d modeling program. Even though it wasn't what my professor was purposefully showing us, I knew I would make a personal website someday - which was randomly decided on a day a off from my retail job, 2 years later.

Creating With a Purpose

You can build your own website from scratch, or use a variety of services to build a website for you. Before I even started trying anything I needed to outline a purpose and outline some goals first:

• I wanted to develop the site from the beginning, no UI from services like Wordpress or Wix; it had to all be programmed, even if that meant creating pages was more methodical


• The site has to be simple at first. I can increase the complexity as the site continues in time


• Make the site with scalability in mind


• Make the site appealing, easily navigable, and digestible to others that read this.

With these points in mind, my research is clearly concentrated and I won't get stuck in any type of hole in concepts and prototypes; to put simply, I can get something out faster no matter how rugged at first. In past incomplete projects, I have found them all to have some lack of structure during the research phase. It was so incredibly easy to try out some new "technology" or some concept without fleshing out the original first. Ultimately this lead to some type of burnout later.

Development Process

The last time I created a site was by following along an instructor's homework asignment for a grade. The instructions were confusing and I remembered it used wordpress but I really wanted a custom domain instead of using my IP Address to find the site. Somehow, I ended up locking myself out of the admin side of the site and I could never update it again. I still passed the assignment though, so that's a positive. I definitely wanted to avoid that mistake this go around.

During my time googling ways to host websites, I found that Github offers a static web hosting service called Github Pages. Github makes it super easy to build your own website now, no need to personally host a site from your own machine, or use a cloud computing service to externally remote into and navigate a terminal, it can all be done within a Github Repository! Some advantages included native support using Git's version control systems, supports custom domains as well as providng SSL certificates to make your site more secure, and it's all free!

Kash Projects uses a custom domain I purchased from CloudFlare, and is currently being hosted via Github Pages. The website is built using the standard HTML/CSS and JS. I did not want to use any frameworks or libraries at the start as that was an unneeded complexity coming in. However, I do have plans to revist and add some backend to this site later down the road.

Roadblocks

1. Owning a Domain

   If you're unfamiliar with networking, domains, proxies, and how the internet is routed overall; it can be a headache to some. I know bits and pieces of everything listed from classes but at the end of the day, it's truly hard to grasp a concept until you see how it's connected in the real world. Even just routing the custom domain to the several servers github uses to redirect client traffic to Github Pages felt a little alien. Though, things like DNS instructions and records felt familiar and referring to some old notes I was able to quickly get myself back into the networking mindset. To newcomers, this rabbithole is easy to get into and might seem daunting at first, but can be extremely useful later on.

2. Revisiting HTML/CSS/JS

   I had some experience in web development coming into this project. This experience was from a computer graphics class and was almost nonexistent at the start as our professor dove us all straight into WebGL. So my confidence in HTML/CSS was pretty low. At least, that's what I thought at the start, it turns out I remembered more than I thought, and even then referring from documentation and examples was drastically easier than ever. I guess learning several other languages - low and high - just make learning new ones that much easier. It still took a good couple of hours to find a rhythm. Really, it was just the 3-4 hours of examples and reading that was the bulk of this roadblock. Even now, there is the occasional "how do I center a div again?" question that feels silly to look up but you just can't quite remember how.

Conclusion

Overall, I am real happy with how easy this project was to get started. I learned so much about system design in such a short time. With this development comes many new ideas to adapt. I am beyond excited to see the evolution of this site and watch it grow. There are going to be changes along the way, and having the documentation will be a joy to read as time passes by.