Rebuilding Usama's corner of the internet
My old site was a FastAPI app serving Bootstrap templates from a Docker container. It worked, but it said very little about me — and a cold-starting container is a strange way to serve four static pages.
This new site is the opposite: static HTML on a CDN, one page that says what I actually do, and a brand with a story.
The mark reads “us” — Usama Shahid — with a sun rising out of the s and a sprout reaching toward it. Growing toward the light. That’s the whole thesis: helping people and products grow.
A few things I cared about in the rebuild:
- Speed as respect. No frameworks on the wire, fonts self-hosted, images optimised at build time. The whole thing is built with Astro, which renders to static HTML and ships almost no JavaScript — the framework does its work at build time, not in your browser. If someone gives you their attention, don’t spend it on spinners.
- Credentials that hold. The site leads with the things that survive scrutiny — IEEE, the UK Global Talent visa, Top 1% on Upwork — not a wall of course certificates.
- A place to write. This section. Notes on AI, teaching, and building things — because the best way to stay sharp is to keep shipping, and the best way to learn is to explain.
More soon. 🌱
Update, a week on. The site now has a few small AI experiments — a digital twin, a writing-search tool, a research agent. Which means a server came back. Worth being precise about why that isn’t a U-turn.
The old server ran around the clock to hand out pages that never changed. The new one is serverless: it sleeps at zero cost and only wakes when someone actually talks to the AI.
Same principle as the rest of the rebuild — don’t make people wait, and don’t pay for idle. The pages are still static HTML on a CDN; the server exists only for the one job that genuinely needs one.
More on how those are built — and why each tool was chosen — over in the writing. 🌱
