I am Chirag Singhal — a software engineer based in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. I build small, fast, free things on the open web.
What is oriz
oriz is the umbrella for everything I publish — a family of static sites that share a sign-in, a design system, and a single principle: useful, free, and quiet. Each site is its own GitHub repository, stitched together through chirag127/oriz, a hub that holds them as git submodules. Hosting is split between Cloudflare (for static reading sites) and Firebase (for app-like sites with auth and a database). Display ads on a few of them cover the domain renewal.
Seven principles
- 01
Static first
Every site is a static build. No backend to scale, no server to pay for, no 3am page. Where state is needed it talks to Firebase from the browser, on the free tier.
- 02
Privacy by default
No tracking beyond Cloudflare's anonymous first-party analytics. Journal entries are end-to-end encrypted. PDF and image tools never upload — they run in your browser.
- 03
Free, no paywall
Display ads on a few sites cover the domain renewal. There is no pro tier, no upsell, no gated feature. If a site is useful, that is enough.
- 04
Owned, not rented
I own the content, the code, and the domain. Every site lives in its own GitHub repository under chirag127/oriz-*. If a hosting provider disappears, the data is mine.
- 05
Small surface
Eleven small sites, each with one job. The shared sign-in works across them. The shared design system means you only learn the controls once.
- 06
Long horizon
A 100-year operating plan: git is canonical, cloud caches are secondary. If everything else fails, a public JSONL mirror on GitHub Pages is the fallback.
- 07
Quiet
No popups. No newsletters you didn't ask for. No "would you like to enable notifications" prompts. The web is loud enough.
Day job
Backend systems, distributed databases, cloud platforms. Off-hours: writing, building these tools, reading. If something on oriz is useful to you, that is enough.
Contact
Email: [email protected]. Use the contact form for anything site-related — typo, broken link, suggestion. For privacy questions or DMCA notices, the grievance officer page is the formal channel (mandatory under IT Rules 2021).