I've never been able to answer "so, what do you do?" in one sentence. By day I'm an AI/ML and full-stack engineer, an NIT Kurukshetra graduate building ContextVolt. After hours I'm on stream, clipping clutch rounds and no-hit boss runs. Most portfolios make you pick a lane — I didn't want to.
So this site has two faces. Flip the toggle in the nav and the whole thing changes clothes: dev mode for the engineering, gamer mode for the rest of me, while staying unmistakably one person. Same identity, two sides.
The look
I ported the ContextVolt aesthetic on purpose — a near-black canvas, a single volt-green accent, and Instrument Serif for the moments that need a little drama. One accent color does a lot of heavy lifting: it ties the marquees, the glow that follows your cursor across the cards, the light rays behind the hero, and the live GitHub contribution graph into something that feels designed rather than assembled.
The parts that were actually hard
The 3D identity card
The hero card is a real WebGL object — photo on the front, a dossier on the flip — built with react-three-fiber. The trap was hydration: the server can't know whether your device supports WebGL or whether you've asked for reduced motion. So I render an optimistic version on the server and re-evaluate on the client, falling back to a flat card when the GPU isn't there. Getting the hero text to reveal in sync with the card warming up, with no flash, took more tries than I'll admit.
The battlestation
Scroll to the workstation and click the monitor — it boots a little desktop. There's a "My Folder" that plays music and clips I upload, a terminal, and a handful of apps. It's the most over-engineered corner of the site and, naturally, my favorite.
The desk phone
This one I'm weirdly proud of. There's a phone on the page a visitor can actually use — message me, or place a real audio call over WebRTC. It rings through to me via a signed Telegram link, so I can pick up from anywhere without logging in, and a leaked link still can't impersonate me. Turning "contact me" into "call me, right now" felt worth the plumbing.
Aiconic, the orb
The floating orb in the corner is a chat assistant with a persona, running on a free LLM tier behind hard guardrails so it can never cost me anything. It answers questions about me when I'm not around to.
The boring-but-important machinery
Behind a hidden /vault there's an owner-only panel where I actually run the site: upload media, flip the ON AIR sign when I go live on YouTube, and — as of this post — write these logs. Auth is a signed, HttpOnly cookie re-checked server-side on every write; the hidden button is just politeness. Content lives in Vercel Blob, and anything that has to reflect a change instantly is rendered fresh per request, so nothing waits on a redeploy.
Why I write these
This is the newest room in the house: The Logs — one feed across both modes, for devlogs, essays, guides, and the occasional hot take. I build in public because the half-finished version is usually more honest than the polished write-up, and because writing something down is how I find out whether I actually understood it.
This is the first post. If you're reading it, the machine works.
— Rithvick