in progress
Building rahulbala.com in public
The product decisions behind this site: who it's for, an evidence-before-copy rule for every claim, and what I cut to keep it honest.
Who it’s for
This site has one reader it has to win: a hiring manager or recruiter filling a Senior PM role in AI products, with a few minutes and a stack of portfolios. That reader doesn’t need a résumé with better fonts. They need to judge the work directly: what I decided, what it did, and what broke. Every decision below follows from that.
Evidence before copy
Every claim on the site, from a user count to a job title, sits in a private evidence ledger with one of four statuses: verified-public, verified-private, needs-verification, or proposed. Only verified-public claims publish, and the homepage proof strip carries nothing else.
The rule has already cost me good-sounding lines. An earlier draft described an AI debate platform as launched. It never served users, so the résumé now says what actually happened: a working product built for a grant bid, and my recommendation against self-funding it on compute economics. Metrics whose measurement window I can’t yet defend stay off the site until I can, even when the number would help.
What I cut
- A prominent TIL section. A near-empty archive weakens the recruiter’s path and creates publishing pressure. Short notes and topic pages still exist, but they’re out of the main navigation and noindexed.
- Most side-project names. Independent builds are described by what they are and what they did. The flagship, motomotar, is named because it carries a full case study.
- An engagement-bait cadence. One substantial piece a week and one project a month is the target. Sustainable beats impressive-for-three-weeks.
Smaller calls
- Work before writing. The information architecture puts case studies first; essays support them, not the other way around.
- Astro, static output. A content site doesn’t need a client framework. It ships zero JavaScript by default, and typed frontmatter means the build fails if an essay’s description runs too long for search results.
Status
Launched November 2026 on Cloudflare Pages, after an evidence audit that checked every career claim against the ledger and tightened the wording wherever attribution was mixed. Live now: the motomotar case study, five essays on LLM evaluation and multilingual products, and an HTML + PDF résumé.
The site is judged on whether the right people reach out after reading it, not on traffic: résumé downloads, contact clicks, and readers who move from a case study to the résumé. Next: a second professional case study (Contentstack Studio, within disclosure limits), the RAG evaluation lab, and the first monthly /now refresh.