Siddharth Sah

Siddharth Sah

Senior AI Engineer

CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

What this is

Personal academic website (siddharthksah.github.io) — a Jekyll site forked (and detached) from academicpages, which is itself a fork of the Minimal Mistakes theme. It is served by GitHub Pages’ native build (the github-pages gem), so there is no test suite, no CI workflow, and no build artifact to commit — pushing to master is the deploy.

Commands

bundle install                    # install Ruby deps (delete Gemfile.lock first if it errors)
bundle exec jekyll serve          # build + serve at localhost:4000, rebuild on change
bundle exec jekyll liveserve      # same, plus live-reload in the browser (via the hawkins gem)
bundle exec jekyll build          # one-off build into _site/ (gitignored)
  • Local serving picks up _config.dev.yml only if you pass it explicitly: bundle exec jekyll serve --config _config.yml,_config.dev.yml (turns off analytics, sets url to localhost, expands SCSS instead of compressing).
  • _config.yml is not reloaded while the server runs — restart jekyll serve after editing it. All other files hot-reload.
  • JavaScript is hand-bundled, not part of the Jekyll build. After editing anything in assets/js/, regenerate the minified bundle: npm run build:js (concatenates + uglifies vendor/plugin/_main.js into assets/js/main.min.js, which is what the site actually loads). npm run watch:js does this on change.

Deploy

Push to master → GitHub Pages rebuilds and publishes automatically. There is no separate gh-pages branch build step and no Actions workflow. Because the plugin set is constrained to the GitHub Pages whitelist (whitelist: / plugins: in _config.yml), any plugin not on that list will silently not run in production — don’t add gems expecting them to take effect.

Content model

Everything is front-matter-driven Markdown/HTML. To add content you add a file to the right folder, not edit a central index.

  • _posts/ — all articles, YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md, each with an explicit permalink: (never change existing permalinks). All posts list on the single /blog/ page; categories/tags in front matter are optional metadata. Image/asset-heavy posts keep a companion directory of the same name next to the .md file — keep the two in sync when renaming or deleting. As of 2026-08-30 every past post sits in _drafts/ awaiting the owner’s rewrite; republish by moving a file back to _posts/ (reuse the exact old permalink for 2023 posts).
  • _pages/ — standalone pages. _pages/about.md is the site homepage (permalink: /); its animated greeting is a small inline grapheme-aware typewriter (Intl.Segmenter — replaced typed.js, which split flag emoji into code units and made them render late). blog.html is the only internal nav destination; nav lives in _data/navigation.yml (Publications links out to Google Scholar).
  • Collections (_publications/, _portfolio/, _talks/, _teaching/) are configured in _config.yml but intentionally empty — the academicpages placeholder content was removed in 2026. Don’t add to them without also recreating listing pages.
  • _drafts/ — unpublished drafts (only shown with --drafts).
  • Homelab/networking posts must never contain public IPs, DDNS hostnames, ISP names, or internal topology.

Structure

  • _layouts/ — page templates (single, splash, talk, archive, default, taxonomy archives).
  • _includes/ — reusable Liquid partials assembled by layouts. Site-specific <head> additions (favicons, MathJax, academicons CSS) go in _includes/head/custom.html.
  • _data/ — navigation.yml (nav bar), authors.yml (multi-author bios), ui-text.yml (i18n theme strings), comments/ (Staticman-submitted comments).
  • _sass/ + assets/css/main.scss — styles. main.scss is the single SCSS entry point that @imports everything in _sass/; Jekyll compiles it (compressed in prod, expanded in dev). Edit partials in _sass/, not compiled CSS.
  • markdown_generator/ — optional Python scripts / Jupyter notebooks that generate _publications/ and _talks/ Markdown from .tsv or BibTeX files. Not part of the site build; run manually when bulk-importing.
  • talkmap/ + talkmap.py / talkmap.ipynb — generates an interactive map of talk locations (opt-in via talkmap_link in _config.yml).

Conventions

  • Match the existing front-matter shape when adding to a collection — copy the fields from a sibling file rather than inventing keys. Per-collection defaults (layout, author_profile, share, comments) come from defaults: in _config.yml, so individual files only need to override.
  • This is a detached fork; upstream README.md/CONTRIBUTING.md describe the generic template’s PR conventions (issues tagged code change) and do not apply to this personal site.