@otaku
they/them

Coding Otaku

Hi, I’m Rahul Sivananda (he/him), the Internet knows me by the name Coding Otaku (them/them) or sometimes as Rua (she/her).

I care about Accessibility, Minimalism, and good User Experiences. I create small tools and scripts to make the life easy.

Get my cURL card with curl -sL https://codingotaku.com/cc.

logo description

Email: contact@codingotaku.com ✅

About This website 🪪

This is my personal website containing my notes, blogs, projects, stories, other things I do, and ways to contact me. It partially supports the IndieWeb while keeping accessibility, minimalism, and your privacy in mind.

Following me 🚶🚶‍♀️🧑‍🦽🧑‍🦼🧑‍🦯

Subscribe to my web feeds if you like what I post and want to read them without visiting this website!

Supporting me 🫂

If you would like to help me to keep this site and my silly projects running, you can now donate to me through Liberapay or Stripe 💰.

Accessibility

If you are having difficulties navigating this website or accessing its content, please contact me with details so that I can fix it for everyone.

You should be able to customise this website to your liking by using the theme selector page.

You can read my accessibility statement to know more about how I ensure the accessibility, the technical specification, and the known issues.

What made me create this website.

The Internet used to be a lovely place where people could share their views and ideas in the public domain. But it has now become a slow and bloated mess made by developers who are following the latest buzzwords for resume-driven development.

I also believe that it is acceptable to use buzzword technologies as long as the people using/visiting the project/site are not burdened. It is too easy to create bloated and heavy software and too difficult to make slim and light ones.

I am hoping to inspire new and young developers to take the right path by making this website, showing that you can still make a functioning, beautiful, ethical, and light-weight website without making it the size of doom.

Behind the name

I like watching Anime just as much as I love tinkering with software. So, I wanted to choose a name that’s related to both programming and Anime.

I had a few candidates for a good name, but none of them rolled out of the tongue like Coding Otaku. To my surprise, no one bought “codingotaku.com” as a domain name, and I could not find anyone on social media going by that name.

While what I do is programming and not coding, the name stuck with me long enough that I’m not bothered by it any more.

Otaku is a Japanese term for people with consuming interests, In modern Japanese slang, the term Otaku is mostly equivalent to “geek” or “nerd”. But it is now widely used as a term to refer to people who are obsessed with Anime and Japanese culture (though that’s not the proper way to use it).

Elsewhere

You might be able to find me on the wild, the clubs and webrings below are websites I willingly added myself to after careful evaluation. To find other places I have account on, visit my contact page.

Webrings

This website is also part of a few webrings. If you would like me to be part of one of your webring, please let me know via email.

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Recent Posts

Recent Notes

Small posts that doesn't need to be a blog/article.

The syndicated posts now show content and tags

Coding Otaku

Published on: 2026-Apr-24 at 20:27:16

Well, only in mastodon, and obviously in archive.org too since it saves the entire page.

It still needs some work, like it would cut off links and other HTML elements because I am not handling it yet, but hey, it works!

I don't scrap the post reactions from mastodon though, though I am thinking about just taking the reaction count and linking to them with a background job.

The best way would be for Mastodon to send me webmentions, I know that lemmy does it, and there are services that can do this for me, but I do not want people self-hosting IndieWemblate to sign up for “even more services”. And I also do not want to overload small mastodon instances with more crawlers…

Google to punish back button hijacking

Coding Otaku

Published on: 2026-Apr-15 at 06:37:39

I don’t like most things google do, but this is something that I want to see done. Google announced two days ago that they are Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking”, they will now be considered spam.

The back button hijacking is when websites overwrite the expectation of what that button should do. It’s rare on personal sites, but I have seen so many companies does this to “keep the engagement” within the site, though it has the opposite effect, user frustration.

Recent Blogs

Blog posts

After 10 Years, I Am Adding JavaScript Back to This Website

Coding Otaku

Published on: 2026-Apr-29 at 07:46:52

I removed JavaScript once to pursue a fully semantic HTML, but it is very hard to keep it accessible without JavaScript when some components are involved.

Ownet

Coding Otaku

Published on: 2026-Apr-24 at 09:05:28

I had to explain what ownet.org is to someone non-technical recently, this is what I could come up with.

Recent Projects

These are just some of my projects, to see more, checkout mycodeberg repository.

Themeinator

Coding Otaku

Published on: 2025-Nov-09 at 19:29:39

A customizable Firefox extension that automatically adapts your browser theme to match your system's light/dark mode preferences.

Bloat Ness Monster

Coding Otaku

Published on: 2024-Dec-04 at 09:53:40
Last updated on: 2026-Apr-24 at 10:05:42

The Bloat Ness Monster is a monster that lurks around on the internet. It was made unintentionally by web developers who don't know what they are doing.

Recent Short Stories

This is a collection of short stories, I initially split them into individual stories but merging them into a collection makes more sense

Immortal: The Controller

Coding Otaku

Published on: 2024-Mar-19 at 17:34:23

An advanced, futuristic world.

The patient: Space Programme

Coding Otaku

Published on: 2024-Feb-03 at 13:09:02

An optimimstic patient.

Recent Transformed

Samantha and her young 6-year-old daughter Jane found that a few mysterious creatures had invaded in their home which can transform into anyone. They attacked her and Jane so she ran away with her daughter to find help and shelter.