hello there! welcome to my website!

if you’re new here,

i’m Debarka Kundu. i’m 16 years old and currently in class 9 (CBSE) at SVAEE.

i spend way too much time messing with linux, self-hosting, photography, travelling, random projects, learning new things, music, and building stuff that probably didn’t need to exist in the first place.

this website is basically where i dump everything i do. projects, blogs, random writeups, photos, opinions, experiments, and whatever else i find interesting enough to write about.

if something here looks unfinished…

it probably is.

i have a habit of starting way too many projects at once. or i simply forget they exist. i also have an absolutely terrible sense of time, and i’m addicted to my phone. (help.)

i’m neurodivergent (autism spectrum disorder + adhd).

it definitely explains a lot.

but i try to be better.

always. (most of the time.)

professionally stupid

class 9 student.

i break things.

sometimes i fix them.

sometimes i accidentally make them better.

i contribute to open source whenever i can, although school has been making that a bit difficult lately.

life (and my own stupid decisions) don’t exactly help either.

interests?

• linux
• self-hosting
• programming
• random hardware
• photography
• documenting random things
• music
• trying things just because i can
• whatever i’m obsessed with this week
• MOREEE!!!!

you can reach me at debarkak@murena.io.

anyways, here’s the unnecessarily long story behind this website.

so basically, i originally wanted to host this website myself. not on GitHub Pages.

i already have an Oracle Cloud OCI VM that’s online 24/7 (free tier, of course, because i am broke), so it would’ve worked just fine. i usually prefer hosting my own projects myself. it gives me a level of control that i honestly can’t explain. (autism moment.)

another reason was that my brother, @preetamsad, has also been considering self-hosting his own website. i remember him asking me (and a few people in his discord server) whether he should host it on a Raspberry Pi 5 or on his VPS.

so naturally i also wanted to self-host mine.

after thinking about it for a while, and after asking a lot of people for advice, i eventually settled on GitHub Pages.

the main reason was honestly just time.

i spent way longer building this website than i expected. even with AI helping me here and there, i kept getting lost trying to make everything look exactly how i wanted.

and if i’m being honest, my phone addiction and terrible sleep schedule probably didn’t help either.

because of that, i decided to host my website on GitHub Pages.

because…

• https.

  GitHub automatically gives me a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. i basically just had to tick a checkbox.

• speed.

  GitHub has servers all over the world. my Oracle server only lives in Hyderabad. for a static website, GitHub Pages is simply going to be faster for almost everyone.

• it survives my stupidity.

  if i somehow manage to break my Oracle server (again), this website will still be online.

however, i’ll still be hosting almost everything else on my Oracle server.

as i’m writing this, my personal homelab server (a Dell Inspiron N4110) died around ~19 hours ago. (timed at the time of writing this blog.)

because of that, i’ll be relying on my Oracle server for most of my self-hosted services.

my Raspberry Pi 5 will become a NAS.

it runs Windows 11.

and because my Oracle server is arm64, compiling x86 software (or running x86-only things) isn’t always practical.

huge thanks to @celunah for letting me use one of his VPSes. it’s in the US, has around 30 GB of storage, and the latency from India is… not great.

but it gets the job done.

i might compile LFS on it one day.

because why not.

now for the conclusion.

could i host everything on Oracle?

absolutely.

should i?

probably not.

sometimes the boring solution really is the better one.

(my parents were right.)

anyway,

thanks for stopping by :)