muhamad.org started in the early 2000s as a tiny blue corner of the web built in plain HTML, a text editor, and way too many table tags. It began as a personal sandbox while I was bouncing between classes, work, and late-night coding experiments. Back then, the site was mostly inside jokes, random Chicago photos (yes, including amjad driving down Lake Shore Drive), and hand-rolled “news updates” about absolutely normal things that felt important at the time: broken servers, updated links pages, and which cousin had just bought a new car. There was no grand plan for branding or traffic—muhamad.org was just a place to tinker, learn how the web worked, and keep friends and family connected.

Over the years, life moved on: medical school, residency, work, family, and a hundred other projects pulled focus. The original files sat on old drives and backup folders while the rest of the internet modernized. Rebuilding muhamad.org in Laravel is partly nostalgia and partly a promise to myself: keep a personal home base online, but make it smarter this time. Behind the same early-2000s look and colors, the new version is fully database-driven, easy to update, and designed to grow with whatever comes next—more photos, side projects, writing, or whatever future “news” needs a home.