{"slug": "i-built-my-own-corner-of-the-internet-here-s-what-it-looks-like", "title": "I Built My Own Corner of the Internet — Here's What It Looks Like", "summary": "The article describes how IT student Nitesh Upreti built a personal website (niteshupreti.com.np) from scratch to serve as a unique, custom portfolio reflecting his identity and cybersecurity focus. The site features a dark mode Rose Pine color palette, custom typography, subtle animations, and sections including a terminal-style introduction, project showcases like the Academic Tracking and Alert System (ATAS), and a photo grid. The goal was to create a premium, personal corner of the internet that goes beyond standard templates or social media profiles.", "body_md": "There's something quietly satisfying about having a place on the internet that is entirely yours. Not a profile on someone else's platform. Not a template with your name swapped in. Something you thought about, designed, and put together from scratch.\nThat's what niteshupreti.com.np is for me.\nI'm an IT student at Kathmandu University, working towards a career in cybersecurity — and like most people in tech, I had a GitHub profile, a LinkedIn, and a vague feeling that I should have a proper portfolio someday.\nSomeday arrived. I decided to build something that actually represented who I am — not just a list of skills and links, but a real reflection of how I think and what I've built.\nThe goal was simple: make it feel like me.\nThe first decision was visual. I wanted something that felt premium without feeling corporate — the kind of site you land on and immediately think this person takes their craft seriously.\nThe whole site runs in dark mode by default, built around a palette called Rose Pine — deep charcoals and navies, with muted rose and warm gold as accent colours. No harsh black, no blinding white. Just a warm, considered darkness that's easy on the eyes at 2am (which is, honestly, when most of the building happened).\nThe fonts are Lexend for everything readable, and JetBrains Mono for code and technical details — the same font I use in my terminal every day. Typography was treated as a design element, not an afterthought.\nSubtle touches are everywhere: floating colour orbs in the background, a fine grid pattern that fades at the edges, cards that lift slightly when you hover, animations that don't overstay their welcome. The light mode toggle is there too — a warm paper-like white for those who prefer it — and your preference is remembered across every page of the site.\nThe first thing you see is a bold introduction — my name, large and unapologetic, with a subtitle that describes what I'm actually focused on: cybersecurity, with a background in Django development, Linux, and Flutter.\nBelow that sits a small terminal window. It types out a command and then prints a structured profile — name, focus, stack, operating system, current status. It's the kind of detail that takes a second to notice and then makes you smile when you do.\nThe about section tells the fuller story. I'm building towards cybersecurity because I want to understand how systems break before I commit to securing them. My engineering background — building Django backends, shipping Flutter apps, living in a Linux terminal — isn't a detour. It's the foundation.\nAlongside the text are three stat cards: years building, projects shipped, and an honest acknowledgement of coffee consumed.\nMy flagship project is ATAS — the Academic Tracking and Alert System. It's a full Django-based monitoring platform built for academic institutions, with attendance tracking, intelligent alerts, and a custom OCR engine built inside it. The OCR uses fuzzy matching and a \"Process of Elimination\" algorithm to read and identify names from scanned documents with high confidence.\nThe project card links directly to the GitHub repository. And below the card, a See More Projects button takes you to projects.niteshupreti.com.np — a dedicated projects page that fetches all my repositories live from GitHub, with filtering by language and real-time star counts.\nA clean grid of the tools I work with daily: Python, Django, Linux, Flutter, and Git. The security-focused ones — a shield icon, a networking terminal icon — sit at the top, visually separated from the development background tools below. Small detail, intentional hierarchy.\nThis might be my favourite section. A masonry photo grid — asymmetric, premium-feeling — with a lightbox that expands any image to full screen. It's a curated look at the moments behind the work: my battle station lit up red, the Harvard Health Hackathon where I presented at Kathmandu University, the Code Genius bootcamp certificate, late-night coding sessions, and a photo in front of KU itself.\nThe gallery also has its own dedicated home at gallery.niteshupreti.com.np, where photos are organised into three collections: Moments, Events & Milestones, and Workspace & Tools.\nThe blog section fetches my latest articles live from Hashnode and displays them as clean cards — cover image, tags, title, brief, and reading time. Clicking a card doesn't take you away from the site. Instead, a full-screen panel slides in from the right, rendering the complete article with beautiful typography: proper headings, syntax-highlighted code blocks, styled blockquotes, and breathing room between paragraphs.\nThe blog lives at blog.niteshupreti.com.np as its own standalone experience too, with filtering by topic and a search bar.\nWhat started as a portfolio became a small ecosystem.\nFour interconnected sites, all sharing the same design language — same colours, same fonts, same navbar, same footer, same light/dark toggle that remembers your preference across all of them. If you switch to light mode on the gallery page, you're already in light mode when you land on the blog.\nA portfolio is a strange thing. It's professional, yes — but it's also personal. It's the answer to the question who are you, actually?\nMine says: I'm someone who pays attention to details. Who thinks building something well is worth the extra time. Who is working deliberately towards cybersecurity because I'm genuinely curious about how things break. Who is proud of what I've shipped and honest about where I'm going.\nIt says all of that without saying any of it directly. Which is, I think, exactly how good design should work.\nIf you'd like to take a look: niteshupreti.com.np\nAnd if you want to talk — about cybersecurity, about building things, or about anything else — I'm at contact@niteshupreti.com.np.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-my-own-corner-of-the-internet-here-s-what-it-looks-like", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/niteshupreti/i-built-my-own-corner-of-the-internet-heres-what-it-looks-like-158b", "published_at": "2026-05-23 02:29:54+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-23 03:04:53.166822+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "cybersecurity", "products"], "entities": ["Nitesh Upreti", "Kathmandu University", "Rose Pine", "Lexend", "JetBrains Mono", "GitHub", "LinkedIn"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-my-own-corner-of-the-internet-here-s-what-it-looks-like", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-my-own-corner-of-the-internet-here-s-what-it-looks-like.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-my-own-corner-of-the-internet-here-s-what-it-looks-like.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-my-own-corner-of-the-internet-here-s-what-it-looks-like.jsonld"}}