nikhil.io

I was born in Hyderabad, India but grew up in a small emirate along the Persian Gulf.

It was an unforgiving but consistent dry heat, my parents made sure we traveled a lot, I was taught by exceptional teachers, and my graduating class had around thirty kids.

I was privileged enough to attend college in America and graduated from The University of Iowa (Go Hawks 🦅). My focus was Biomedical Engineering but I somehow veered towards the programmatic side of things and ended up specializing in Bioinformatics & Computational Biology.

I helped scientists and staff at the Iowa Institute for Vision Research before moving to Corteva AgriScience where I wrote software for more scientists, sequencing machines, greenhouse robots, salespeople, and customers. After studying statistics at Georgia Tech, I’m now at Columbia where I’m learning how to create meaningful and thoughtful experiences for both clinicans and the people they care for.

I resided in Iowa almost continuously for the past twenty-four years. During this time, I met a lovely girl who inexplicably agreed to marry me.

I am an avid note-taker and use this site to log things of interest¹ and experiment with personal publishing, programming, and design. Here’s what I’m up to now and things I like using.

I’d love to hear from you about anything you’d like to say 🤗

Colophon #

Text is mostly set in Lineto Circular which makes me very happy to look at. All icons are from the excellent Phosphor library. Colors are from palettes like Gruvbox, Marvel Comics, and books like these.

I write all posts in Markdown and manage content with a minimally customized fork of the excellent 11ty.js and a lot of markdown-it plugins. I’ve found TSX to be far superior for templating than ye olde Nunjucks or anything else I’ve tried thus far. To use it, I have a small setup that registers ESBuild with Node to transpile TypeScript and TSX for 11ty². I use Tailwind in a manner I’m told it’s not really supposed to be used³ along with SASS to keep things modular and manageable⁴.

Live-reloading is provided by Vite. Search on the archive page is via SQLite⁵ and SQL.js, while other pages like this one use state-of-the-art programming techniques. I push my content to GitHub which tells CircleCI to build and publish things to Amazon’s cloud⁶ where I have all this stuff configured using Terraform.

On the 2o 'of' November 2025 it took four seconds to generate this entire mess on an arm64 system running macOS 15.6 with a 8-core 2.4 GHz Apple M2 CPU and 25.77GB of memory.

Privacy #

I use Plausible for privacy-friendly analytics. I set some keys in Local Storage to drive various views, like Light/Dark modes. No cookies 🍪