I am Imtiaz, from New York USA.
How I got into Web Develoaping:
I always wanted to make my own personal website. Since the first time I had access to the Internet in the 2011ish. During that time one of my private math and English tuition teacher had a personal website, and that was pretty cool too me. I remember showing his personal website to other people I know.
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 of my Middle school.
After 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 come to my mind in my second year in college. In our Math 328, Technique in Data Science Python, class we have to make a website for our final projects.
The Prof. Said that we can make our site in Google site or Wix. But I hated working with those service. I remember looking up on Youtube for I hosted that site on Github Pages. My Math Website. website making ideas. And I saw a basic HTML and CSS video. After watching few videos, I remember thinking how fucking easy is to make website. I always though that coding 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. 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 basic of web-development. At that time I decided I will make my own personal website, mainly to show my photography to the world.
At that time, Early 2026, I was also super into Raspberry Pi Computer. I had few of those in my home running different projects, like Pi-Hole, BOINC, and 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 will burn a very little amount of electricity. I did not want to pay 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 application. It is free and open source software for hosting website, simple or complex. Big name companies like AirBnB, Netflix, Dropbox GitHub uses Nginx for their website hosting. It is also very light-weight for running on a Raspberry Pi 4. So, I brought a Pi 4, 4Gb Ram version and added a 500gb SSD from one of my old computer and started a web server.
My Current Workflow for this Website:
I have my Raspberry Pi running headless Debian Linux and NGINX on top of that for web-hosting. I write my code in my Mac Mini or Fedora Linux laptop. I use a lot of AI Javascript and CSS coding. But No AI writing or pictures will ever be on this site. I love Vibe Coding! Then I use to Git to send the updated code to my Pi’s ssd. Then right away my live site have the new content. I also use Let's Encrypt by EFF for the SSL certificate, the green padlock on my website. Pretty simple and easy workflow.