I’m Tanishq Bhakar, a third-year B.Tech CSE student from VIPS-TC, India, applying for the Website Modernization project.
What I’ve done so far
Built the site locally early on, that’s how issue #731 came about, a systematic audit of inline CSS patterns across the site. Two PRs merged: #774 (CSS architecture refactor, 6 review iterations) and #795 (Escape key + ⌘K/Ctrl+K UX for Algolia search). I also filed issue #796 proposing consolidation of the duplicate Algolia logic, it now has two independent PRs open against it (#801 and #823), which I’ve been reviewing and comparing on the issue thread.
How I’m thinking about the project
The Jekyll→Hugo migration isn’t just a build tool swap, it means disentangling years of Liquid logic from templates without breaking a site researchers depend on daily. I’ve been thinking in concrete terms: the window.ALGOLIA_CONFIG bridge pattern keeps JS framework-agnostic before the migration, whereas carrying Jekyll front matter into algolia-search.js creates friction the moment Hugo enters the picture. These decisions compound and I’d rather establish the right patterns from week one.
Motivation
At my MIC internship I worked on government portals that were functional but clunky. Beyond fixing existing issues, I built new modules from scratch, including an assessment section for Innovation Ambassadors. That taught me where the real engineering happens: concurrent users, edge cases in form state, usability for people who aren’t technical.
That experience shaped how I think about modernization work- it’s not about rewriting things, it’s about understanding why decisions were made and finding a path forward that doesn’t break what’s already working. That’s exactly the kind of problem the Jekyll→Hugo migration presents.
Background
Interned at MIC (Angular frontend, backend debugging, 10K+ users) and Palanam Technologies (Python data pipelines at scale). GitHub was central to both internships and to the SIH 2025 project - PR workflows, team collaboration, review-driven iteration. Both my preCICE PRs went through multiple maintainer review rounds.
National Winner, Smart India Hackathon 2025 · Amazon ML Summer School 2025
Stack: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, C++, MERN, Angular, Bootstrap, Jekyll/Hugo.
Availability: Fully available throughout GSoC with no other commitments.
Working on my proposal and would value early feedback on the technical direction before the submission window. Happy to share a draft here when it’s ready.