Hi,

I'm Daksh Babbar, both the author and subject of this website. I built it out of a desire to create something challenging and put my frontend skills to the test in an unconventional project that I fully own.

Broadly speaking, it was a rewarding experience -- more so than it was frustrating. I chose not to use GSAP, instead forcing myself to implement similar functionality using Svelte's built-ins, hoping to learn something from the constraint. In hindsight, I did. That said, animations were particularly painful to work with; Svelte's animation library fights you with timing and delay changes across states, and its wrapping and mounting behavior during transitions is unintuitive at best.

This was all before I migrated the codebase from Svelte to Astro 5. Svelte-Motion's package size made it impractical over InView given that both covered everything this site needed, and the improvements in Astro 5 made a pure Astro approach viable where it previously wasn't.

A shoutout to the creators of Tailwind CSS and Astro for making web development more fulfilling, efficient, and genuinely enjoyable.

I'm happy with where the site stands in terms of aesthetics, feel, and functionality, and I hope you are too. I'll continue smoothing out rough edges (like optimization for lower-end systems) as I learn more. Feedback of any kind is always welcome.
Have a great day.

Best,
Daksh
contact@dakshbabbar.com