About

About the man

My work face...

So you instinctively click “About” links too, huh?

Welcome. I’m Siddhant / सिद्धांत/ Sid / sidcode! It’s Sanskrit for tenet / principle / code.

One of many on Earth, I might add. There are numerous Siddhant Shrivastavas on LinkedIn alone. Tip: You know which one is the real me by messaging me in parseltongue or showing a fascination for head mounted displays….

About the website

When someone else’s theme and code is used in FOSS, it’s customary to brag about explain the technology used to create and serve the site. I have no idea who actually reads these summaries, but for posterity’s sake…

My goal was to create the fastest-possible website using the brain-dead easiest technical solutions, as I would advise anyone. Polite cough. I would actually advise them to use hakyll and become a wannabe gwern.net.

This website is a static site created by Pelican, a Python static site generator. I added a few custom Python extensions to bend the Jinja2 templating engine to my will.

Eric Lawler created the theme —both the desktop and mobile variants. The basis for the theme is Dave Liepmann’s Edward Tufte CSS, which powers the lovely serifed font and gorgeous margin notes you see throughout the site. The code highlighting theme is Solarized Dark. All this will change as I modify the site to my taste. Till then, thanks Eric!

The website is hosted by Github Pages.Why not AWS? That question deserves a standalone article. The short answer: #StudentLifeforLife.

Lastly, everything is checked into git with my usual level of detail (and a helpful serving of wackiness).

How to build this website

…so Sid doesn’t forget. This is pretty straightforward. You need pipOkay, no, you don’t technically need Pip, you can install all the Python .py files by hand, of course. And you’ll have to when pip inevitably stops working in ~2028 because the world has moved on to the next great thing., the Python package manager:

  1. pip install pelican
  2. pip install Markdown
  3. That’s it! You can now run make devserver from the root directory and navigate to localhost:8000.

(Are you a proud member of the 0.001% who use feed readers? sidcode.github.io has an Atom feed available here, but your reader should automatically discover the feed on any letters page.)