Sashin Exists Website
Before being a software developer, I consider myself a writer.
I’ve published over fifty pieces, and there was a time in my life where I was putting out a piece a week.
My intention was to make a living off my writing and it never actualised.
I largely spread the word of my writing through online communities and word of mouth and reached about a hundred subscribers on my email list.
I also attended a Writer’s meetup every week where I would read pieces that I’d written.
I wrote about science, philosophy and meditation.
I explored questions such as:
- How do we know what we know?
- How do we live happily?
- What does it mean to be moral?
Unfortunately, despite being able to publish a high volume of pieces, many of which I am still proud of, I was never able to monetise my work.
I’m not willing to put ads on my website, the ways that I’ve tried to do so include accepting donations through various platforms (including Patreon and Kofi), selling merchandise including cups and mugs with my favourite quotes, providing Amazon affiliate links to books that I’ve read and recommend, and a subscription service to be able to view my notes and drafts before they become published pieces.
During the period of time I was focused on writing my saving dwindled and I was forced to find employment as a software developer again.
Despite this, I haven’t given up on my aspirations to write. I’ve changed a lot as a person since then, and have since learned a lot about how the world works.
I now want to write about how the world works. I want to write about politics, economics and history.
My mission is to develop a deep understanding as to how our society works and strive to make that common knowledge.
In the short-to-medium term, I no longer feel that it’s feasible to make a living through writing.
I want to find stable work in software development that is part-time that will leave me ample time and energy to pursue writing.
My original website was a Wordpress site. I had created the theme (the CSS and PHP) myself.
You can still see the original wordpress site here on the Internet Archive.
In 2017, when leaving my job to pursue writing, I’d grown tired of Wordpress viewing it to be needlessly clunky and difficult to maintain.
I switched over to using Ghost, which is currently being used.
What I loved about Ghost, is that a ghost theme is essentially a normal static website made up of HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Compared to what I had before, it was very easy to maintain, and the maintenance resembled normal web development a lot more.
I often get a lot of compliments about how my website looks, I designed it myself.
I used this website to create my colour scheme, revolving around my black and green which are my favourite colours.
The font used across the website is Ubuntu which I considered my favourite at the time.
I still really like it, I feel like it balances being very clear, easy-to-read and legible with being distinctive.
Michael Ashcroft liked my website enough that after seeing it, he hired me to work on his own.
In the future, I intend to rebuild my website using Web Origami, which is what this very portfolio is built from.
The beautiful thing here is that I’ll just be serving plain text. I’ll maintain all the data as text files on my computer and have them generate static HTML files.
No server-side code, no javascript running on the client, no databases, no hidden complexity.
My current philosophy with websites is very much inspired by this.