Nikhil Anand
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nikhil Anand, whose blog can be found at nikhil.io . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hi I'm Nikhil! I grew up the UAE and came to the United States for college and graduated with a degree in biomedical engineering. I worked in academia and industry for about 15 years before deciding to turn my attention and energies towards problems in healthcare. I'm now a graduate student at Columbia University's Medical Center and am studying clinical informatics and loving the magnificent beehive that is New York City. With the time I have, I love going to art museums, practicing calligraphy, reading short stories and graphic novels, and watching every suspense/mystery show or movie I can (huge fan of the genre; for example I've watched all of Columbo at least three times). I'm also trying to learn CAD and have 3D printed several small abominations. I started blogging around 2003 after discovering blogs like Kottke.org, Jeffrey Zeldman's blog , Greg Storey's Airbag.ca , and Todd Dominey's WhatDoIKnow.org . My first blog was at freeorange.net which I now use as a placeholder for my tiny LLC's future site. I used to live in Ames, Iowa at the time and decided to and blog what I knew, about stuff going on in the town: gossip, lectures and shows I'd attended, photos of random scenes and events, and so on. That last part proved to be great: I'd hear from a quite a few alumni or former residents who'd have photo requests for nostalgia and I'd gladly oblige, especially since I was super excited to use my first digital camera, a whopping 5 megapixel Sony DSC-F717 😊 I then stopped blogging for about 10 or so years and resumed in 2018. My current blog is essentially a freeform dump: just this mélange of stuff I find interesting and/or may want to reference later. There's really no audience in mind. I use a lot of tags on my posts and am often delighted by exploring them a while later. I moved all my bookmarks over from PinBoard (an excellent service) and am trying to get off Instagram . I'm also trying to be better about making and sharing things (photos, calligraphy, art) no matter how terrible they are and not just consuming them. As for the name, I really wanted a domain hack, , but this sadly required permission from the Israeli government I was pretty sure I wouldn't get 😅 So I went with the shortest and 'coolest' TLD I could find and ended up with nikhil.io. I also have nikhil.fish as an alias for no reason. I think half my site's half a a tumblelog . As for the other half, I have a Markdown file called in my iCloud Drive that I dump inchoate thoughts into (it's at about half a meg right now). I also use the excellent Things app on my phone to save blog posts, names, recommendations, articles, and media of interest to peruse later. When I have time, I look at these two sources to post and comment on something I think is beautiful, interesting, or funny. All professional creatives I know personally have a space that they attend to do their work and they have told me that this matters immensely to them. In my case, I have a setup I've used reliably over many years and love it. I especially love my sit-to-stand desk (on wheels), giant display, and clickity-clack keyboard. I always listen to ambient music or white noise while working on anything ( Loscil 's works are a favorite). I've found that I just cannot focus in coffeehouses or libraries. And I absolutely cannot work or think in harsh "cool white" lighting (3000K or lower; if you need me to divulge secrets, just put me in a room with two tubelights for thirty seconds). I know a lot of people (like my wife , a writer) who can work anywhere and may be a bit envious. I am also in the habit of pacing around and muttering things to myself while working and these are not nice things to do at coffeehouses or libraries. I write all my posts in Markdown and use an old and heavily modded version of 11ty.js with several Markdown-it plugins and supported by quite a few and Node scripts to generate the HTML pages. Images are processed with Sharp . The blog theme is a mess of TSX and SASS files. All posts and code are in and Github. I build everything on my laptop and sync all the files to an S3 bucket that serves my blog through CloudFront. Not really. I've spent enough time monkeying with the design/structure and code where my setup fits my needs like a bespoke suit. You can always nerd out over tooling, and it's a lot of fun, but I've suspended that in favor of using the tools. For the time being at least 😅 Now if my wife or a friend were starting a blog, I would absolutely recommend a platform like Bear . Anything simple, hosted, not creepy, and not run by greedy and/or awful people. It costs ~$5 a month. A giant part of that cost is the domain name. Zero revenue. No plans on 'growing' it or whatever; it's just my little garden on the internet. I have no problem with people monetising their blogs as long as the strategy they employ is respectful to visitors' privacy and unobtrusive to their experience. Patronage/memberships aside, The Deck comes to mind as an ad platform that achieved both these things very well. I do have my problems with platforms like Substack and might write a blog post about this later. Please interview Chris Glass ! His lovely and popular blog is a huge inspiration for mine, layout and content, and he's been at it since at least 2003 IIRC. Another old favorite is Witold Riedel's log . I'm also really digging this blog I discovered recently. I just put up a small project I've wanted to do for a while, my own little curated digital gallery of art I've loved over the years. It was mostly a design exercise but I thought I might use some LLM to discover some themes in why I love these works (or maybe you just love looking at things and don't really need to understand why). Other than that, I am so happy with what feels to me like a resurgence in personal blogging (here's a recent index of personal blogs from readers of HackerNews). Thank you for having me in your beautiful space and featuring several other lovely and interesting people! This is a fantastic project Manu 🤗 Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 134 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.
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