Soumya Kalra

Chief Data Officer, San Francisco

Soumya Kalra

I'm a data & product executive with a unique cross-sector track record: building and scaling data-centric products in high-compliance environments at both the municipal and private-sector levels.

As Chief Data Officer for the City & County of San Francisco, I lead a multidisciplinary citywide data team at DataSF architecting an enterprise data strategy, aligning 50+ departments under a common framework of data management, privacy, security, and ethical use of data with AI.

Passionate about diversity in technology, I founded R-Ladies NYC and served on the R in Finance Committee.

January 2026

Ship Your Site Faster: Building with AI

Building a personal website used to be a multi-week marathon. But with the right stack—and a little help from AI—it's now a sprint.

I even used Gemini as a 'prompt architect'—feeding it my rough ideas (because it has more context on me through chats) and having it craft the perfect instructions for Claude Code. Think of it as having one AI help you talk to another AI.

The Stack

I kept things simple: plain HTML5, Tailwind CSS for styling, and GitHub Pages for deployment. My domain came from Namecheap, which made the final connection... complicated (more on that in a second).

The build was surprisingly smooth, but I hit my biggest roadblock at the finish line: connecting my custom domain. I had an old project hogging the domain settings, and disconnecting it from an old repo to point it toward my new GitHub project was the one part AI couldn't solve for me.

Pro-tip: If you're repurposing a domain, clear your DNS settings and old hosting connections before you try to link your new deployment. It'll save you an hour of head-scratching.

Resources That Got Me There

The Takeaway

Don't get bogged down in syntax. Focus on the vibe and the brand, and let AI agents handle the code. Start with Riley's tutorial, spend an afternoon with Claude Code, and you could be live by next weekend. The tools are ready—are you?