Long long ago... (no, right here in this galaxy) I used to run my own website. It had slowly evolved from being rather focused on a single topic - tanks, into a way for me to share my writing, work and interests with my friends. Given my wide set of interests, the site soon lost any connection with its original identity. It had also become rather bulky, and I had switched to hosting it off my own machine because uploading updates back in the day used to be a pain.

It was time for a major overhaul, but final-year engineering, and preparing for CAT so that I could do my MBA took priority. Unfortunately for the site, I scored pretty well at CAT, and was off to Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad for 2 years. When I got there, I thought I would resurrect my site, after our seniors had finally gotten bored of their typical initiation activities. Only problem was, given the highly secure intranet on campus, my site would be accessible only to people on campus. That kind of defeated the point, and I wasn't feeling up to shifting back to a webhosting service provider.

2 years passed by pretty quickly, and I found myself working at Perot Systems. Needless to say, the site was pretty much forgotten by then. But then around November, 2008, I was asked to design a site for my team at work. What started as a somewhat amateur attempt at a website, using my rusty skills, soon started looking a lot more professional as I picked up new stuff on the way. Soon I started experimenting with Javascript frameworks, and by mid 2009 I had built a second site for the team that looked a lot cooler.

That's when I started thinking, "Hey, I've learnt quite a few new things. Maybe it's time I used them to resurrect my site!"

There were 3 problems though...

  • facebook had kind of made personal websites redundant
  • I was busier than ever with work
  • I'd still have to figure out how to host my site once I make it
And so, it wasn't until Jan, 2010, when I was relatively free from work that I started thinking...
  • Maybe I can integrate my site with facebook, so that my friends can leave comments, and my site-updates flash in their newsfeed
  • There has got to be more to my life than just work - time to get back to some of my old hobbies!
  • We'll figure out the hosting and the facebook integration - let's get started somewhere at least...

Well, here we are. Just like the old site, this one is going to start small and simple, and evolve over time towards what I have envisioned. I've also learnt that given the general nature of my site, I'd better think of some rather random name for it so that it doesn't get straight-jacketed into dealing with a narrow field. Since the common link to everything on this site is its creator, and since its creator is often (erroneously) referred to as Roach... this is it.

More on the whole "Roach" thing later...