siddeshsambasivam.com

The source for my personal website — writing, projects, and a bit about what I'm working on. Built with Hugo and deployed on Netlify.

Engineering lead at Hypotenuse AI, building LLM infrastructure for ecommerce product data at scale.

Stack

• Hugo v0.132+ (extended) — static site generator
• Vanilla CSS + JS — no framework runtime, ~6KB JS, fingerprinted assets via Hugo Pipes
• Source Serif 4 / Inter / JetBrains Mono — Google Fonts
• Netlify — build, deploy, headers, redirects

Run locally

# install hugo (extended)
brew install hugo

# start the dev server with drafts visible
hugo server -D

# production build
hugo --gc --minify

The site is served at http://localhost:1313.

Project structure

.
├── archetypes/             # `hugo new` scaffolds (default, writing, projects)
├── assets/                 # processed by Hugo Pipes (fingerprinted)
│   ├── css/main.css
│   ├── js/main.js
│   └── media/              # source images (resized at build)
├── content/
│   ├── _index.md           # home
│   ├── about.md
│   ├── writing/            # blog posts
│   └── projects/           # project pages
├── data/
│   ├── work.yaml           # work history (rendered in the timeline)
│   └── publications.yaml   # selected publications
├── layouts/
│   ├── 404.html
│   ├── _default/           # base, list, single
│   ├── index.html          # home composition
│   ├── index.llms.txt      # llms.txt template
│   ├── partials/           # head, nav, footer, icons, jsonld, ...
│   └── sitemap.xml
├── static/                 # served as-is at the site root
│   ├── images/
│   └── robots.txt
├── hugo.toml               # site config (params, menu, geo, output formats)
└── netlify.toml            # build, headers, redirects

Adding content

A blog post

hugo new writing/my-post.md

Front matter fields the layout uses:

title: "Post title"
date: 2026-01-01
subtitle: "One-line summary shown under the title and in feed rows."
status: "New"             # optional pill in the header
tags: ["systems", "llm"]
icon: pen                 # icon name from layouts/partials/icons.html
cover: /images/cover.png  # optional banner image
toc: true                 # opt out with `false`

A project

hugo new projects/my-project.md

Front matter the project layout understands:

title: "Project name"
oneliner: "Short pitch shown in the home feed row."
subtitle: "Longer description shown on the project page."
status: "Active"
tags: ["python", "ml"]
icon: stack
weight: 10                # controls order on home + index page
banner_label: "label"
banner_icon: stack
meta:
  - { label: "Language", value: "Python" }
  - { label: "Stars",    value: "9" }
actions:
  - { label: "Repository", url: "https://github.com/...", icon: "github", primary: true }

Work history

Edit data/work.yaml — each entry renders as a timeline item with bullets:

- id: hyp-lead
  when: "Apr 2026 - Present"
  role: Lead Software Engineer
  company: Hypotenuse AI
  current: true
  bullets:
    - "Bullet one."
    - "Bullet two."

Site features

• Light + dark theme with localStorage persistence and a pre-paint script (no flash).
• Sliding nav pill that snaps to the active link and slides on click.
• Animated timeline (grid-template-rows trick — no max-height hacks).
• Sticky footer, responsive hero (centers on mobile), and per-viewport line-clamp on cards.
• Search on writing/projects index pages with ⌘/Ctrl-K shortcut.
• TOC sidebar on long posts with active-section highlighting via IntersectionObserver.

SEO, GEO, and LLM friendliness

• JSON-LD structured data: Person + WebSite on home, BlogPosting on posts, CreativeWork on projects, BreadcrumbList everywhere.
• OpenGraph + Twitter cards with auto-generated 1200×630 OG image (uses post cover if set).
• Geo meta tags (geo.region, geo.position, ICBM) driven by params.geo.
• /llms.txt generated via a custom Hugo output format (llmstxt.org spec) with a discoverable <link rel="alternate">.
• robots.txt explicitly allows GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Anthropic-AI, Google-Extended, CCBot, Applebot, Meta-ExternalAgent, cohere-ai, and Bytespider.
• Custom sitemap with per-section priorities and changefreq.

Deployment

Pushes to main trigger a Netlify build. The build command and headers live in netlify.toml.

Context	Command
production	hugo --gc --minify
deploy-preview	hugo --gc --minify --buildFuture -b $URL
branch-deploy	hugo --gc --minify -b $URL

Hugo version is pinned via HUGO_VERSION in [build.environment].

License

Code in this repository is licensed under the MIT License. Written content (everything under content/) is © Siddesh Sambasivam Suseela — please don't repost wholesale, but feel free to quote with attribution.