Portfolio hosting cost breakdown cover

What I Actually Spend on Running mhassan.dev: $8/year

My portfolio costs me about $8/year. That’s the domain. Everything else is free. Here’s the full breakdown and the tradeoffs behind each choice. The Stack What Tool Cost Static site generator Hugo + PaperMod Free Hosting GitHub Pages Free Domain Porkbun (mhassan.dev) ~$8/year Analytics Umami (self-hosted) Free Comments Giscus Free SSL GitHub Pages auto-provision Free Why Hugo Over Next.js or Astro I tried Astro first. It was fine. But Hugo builds my entire site in under 200ms. Astro took 4 seconds. For a markdown blog with no client-side interactivity, that’s 4 seconds of complexity I don’t need. ...

February 15, 2025 · 2 min · Muhammad Hassan Raza
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The Invoice Page That Took 4 Seconds to Search

In Polaris, the POS system I built for retail shops, the invoice page has a product search bar. A cashier types a product name, results appear, they click to add it to the invoice. Simple. Except it wasn’t. Every keystroke fired an API call. On a shop with 500 products, search took 3-4 seconds because each request hit the database, serialized the response, and traveled back over the network. Cashiers were waiting on every single search. During rush hours, this was painful. ...

February 11, 2025 · 2 min · Muhammad Hassan Raza
Web development learning resources comparison diagram

Free Web Dev Platforms That Are Actually Worth Your Time

I get asked this a lot as a lab instructor: “Where should I learn web development?” Here’s what I actually recommend, and why. The Three I’d Pick freeCodeCamp — Best all-around Entirely free, non-profit, with real certificates. The curriculum is project-based — you build 5 projects per certification, not just follow along with videos. The community forum is massive and genuinely helpful. I recommend starting here if you don’t know what you don’t know. The responsive web design and JavaScript certifications give you enough foundation to build real things. ...

January 4, 2025 · 2 min · Muhammad Hassan Raza