Imtiaz Mahmud

About me

Hi, I’m Imtiaz.

I am Imtiaz, from New York USA.

• ● The Bronx, New York
• ● From Bangladesh
• ● Photographer
• ● Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi

I. How I got into web developing

1. 2011

   I always wanted to make my own personal website, since the first time I had access to the Internet in 2011-ish. During that time one of my private math and English tuition teachers had a personal website, and that was pretty cool to me. I remember showing his personal website to other people I know.

2. 2017

   I did not have access to reliable internet when I was in Bangladesh. Then around 2017, when I immigrated to New York, I started a Google Blog site with a custom domain name. I used to post my class notes and homework from middle school.

3. College

   After a couple of months I got bored of that Google blog and deleted the whole project. Then I kind of forgot about this website making. The idea came to my mind in my second year in college. In our Math 328, Techniques in Data Science (Python) class, we had to make a website for our final project.

   The Prof. said that we could make our site in Google Sites or Wix. But I hated working with those services. I remember looking up website making ideas on YouTube, and I saw a basic HTML and CSS video. After watching a few videos, I remember thinking how fucking easy it is to make a website. I always thought that coding a website from scratch is super hard and I have to have a computer science degree to be able to make one. Then I decided that I will use HTML and CSS to make my Math 328 final project website. I hosted that site on GitHub Pages: My Math 328 Website.

   For my math website, I used AI to do a lot of coding for me. But because that was a simple and easy site, the coding was also easy to understand. I learned the basics of web development. At that time I decided I will make my own personal website, mainly to show my photography to the world.

4. Early 2026

   At that time, early 2026, I was also super into Raspberry Pi computers. I had a few of those in my home running different projects, like Pi-hole, BOINC and a Tor relay. So, I decided that I will host my own website in my home on a Raspberry Pi. I knew that Pis are very efficient and burn very little electricity. I did not want to pay a monthly fee to some data center to host my simple static website. It is a few bucks a month, but still, why pay?

   Then I did some research on how to host a website. I was watching YouTube videos and asking AI. The most common answer was Nginx, free and open source software for hosting websites, simple or complex. Big companies like Airbnb, Netflix, Dropbox and GitHub use Nginx for their websites. It is also very lightweight for running on a Raspberry Pi 4. So, I bought a Pi 4, the 4 GB RAM version, added a 500 GB SSD from one of my old computers and started a web server.

II. My current workflow for this website