It's always a challenge to learn something new. It’s so easy to stay in your comfort zone—it offers security but comes at the cost of growth. Attending this induction and completing a project became my way of stepping outside that comfort zone.

When I received the message about the induction taking place, I was on a trip—far from home and even farther from being able to complete the task they had assigned. Although it was just the basics, I still wasn’t ready. The entire month of December flashed before my eyes—how it had gone by without me accomplishing the one thing I had promised myself. While I wasn’t entirely at fault (a significant part of December was spent dealing with a health issue), the regret hit me hard.

As soon as I saw the message and realized the submission was still 15 days away, I knew what I had to do. I finally returned to Rourkela on the 2nd, and from that day onward, I focused on learning enough to create a website I could be proud of. And now, I’m happy to say that I did it—I made a website that I am genuinely proud of. For me, it was never about the selection; it was about keeping the promise I made to myself.

I will now share more details about how I approached building this website.

To start, I watched a couple of YouTube videos on HTML and CSS. I worked on mastering the basics and practiced enough to ensure my website didn’t look like it was created by a 5th grader. Spending so much time learning, however, began to affect my motivation. I started doubting whether I could finish on time, but I kept pushing through. One breakthrough moment came when I found a YouTube video where the creator rebuilt the YouTube homepage. Watching the entire 6-hour video gave me enough fundamentals to begin working on my first project: this blog website.

The header—ironically the smallest section of my website—took me the most time to create. Maybe it was the friction of having to move away from just following tutorials and figuring things out on my own. I designed the logo using Canva. Initially, the blog was going to be called "The Level Up," but that felt like just a placeholder. I wanted something more personal. That’s when I came up with the arrow pointing upwards as the logo—it symbolizes growth.

I wanted the website to have a minimalistic and clean vibe, so I stuck to a simple black-and-white color scheme. The header, which also acts as my navigation bar, features a "Home" and an "About" button, and I built it using Flexbox. Once the header was complete, I had a clearer idea of how I wanted the rest of the website to look.

For the main highlight of my website, I wanted something visually striking. While searching for inspiration, I came across a concept called parallax scrolling. I decided to incorporate it into my website. To achieve this, I spent time understanding the different CSS positioning properties and experimenting with various implementations to make it look perfect. I must say, I am satisfied with the result.

Creating the blog sections was relatively straightforward, as I used Flexbox for the layout. The content, although largely generated by ChatGPT, is something I plan to revisit and refine when I have more time. This induction means a lot to me hence I wanteed to write the blog for this by myself

This entire experience has taught me so much about web development. If I get the opportunity to be part of the Webwiz community, I’m confident that this spark within me will continue to grow.