Me
Hello friends 👋!
My name is Shahzeb Mirza and I’m a thermal / mechanical design engineer based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Professional
For the last few years, I’ve been working at a Powertrain Startup called Conifer as a Thermal and Product Engineer. We’re making cool-ass motors.
Academic
I got my Master’s in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toronto, where I researched metallic phase change materials for thermal management applications in power electronics under the supervision of Dr. Sanjeev Chandra and [Dr. Cristina H. Amon](https://www.mie.utoronto.ca/faculty_staff/amon.
The Website
Overall Philosophy
This website is a place for me to post my projects (personal and professional), some general professional updates, and if I have a lot of time on my hands one day - a blog post.
The website’s framework and tech-stack may change but I want it to stay lightweight, user-friendly, scaleable, and pretty.
If the website ever stops being these things, please let me know! The source code is freely available on My Github to comment on.
The Stack
This website is hosted on GitHub Pages, a freely available static website hosting service provided by GitHub. The great thing here is Github used global CDNs to serve the content, so no matter where you are in the world, the website should load quickly âš¡.
On January 1, 2026, I transitioned my old website built with Jekyll to a new website powered by Hugo. Hugo is a very fast static site generator written in Go, and I found it better supported the features I was looking for. Of course in 2026, vibecoding makes pretty much any framework quick to develop on. But I also enjoy grokking the tools I’m using, and Hugo had the advantage there over Jekyll for me.
The website theme is based on the very popular PaperMod theme with a fair number of customizations. I call it PaperModMod. Some of the custom features I’ve added include a better theme switcher, a grid-based homepage, and some custom shortcodes for embedding content.
I bring this tech-stack up explicitly to help the next non-software engineer pick an architecture. To get a blog going, there’s a continuum of complexity out there from Twitter to Substack to WordPress to Hugo to raw HTML/CSS/JS hosted on your own mini-server. For me, this works, but your mileage may vary!