Issue 01

This site is a running log of things I learn and the projects I build. The most important property it has is that publishing is frictionless: writing a new post is exactly as much work as creating a Markdown file and pushing to git. No CMS, no dashboard, no database.

The stack#

It’s built with Astro as a fully static site. Every TIL and every post is a Markdown file with a little frontmatter block at the top: a title, a date, some tags. Astro reads those files at build time, validates the frontmatter against a schema, and turns each one into a page. The output is plain HTML and CSS with essentially no client-side JavaScript, so pages load instantly and there’s nothing to break.

There are 4 kinds of writing here:

• TILs (“Today I Learned”), short, dated, tagged notes. This is the heart of the site and where most of the activity is.
• Blogs, longer writeups and essays, like this one.
• Links, cool stuff I found on the internet.
• Projects, writeups on the stuff I have built.

Why no JavaScript framework#

Because the content is the product. A personal site that’s mostly text doesn’t need a rendering framework shipped to the browser; it needs good typography, a readable column width, and fast loads. Keeping the build static means the whole site is a folder of HTML files that any host can serve, and there’s no runtime to patch or attack.

Following along#

Everything is available as a feed. There’s a combined feed of TILs and posts, and if you only want one or the other, each has its own. Feeds carry the full text, so you can read without ever visiting the site that’s the point of them.

If you want to see how the sausage is made, the source is on GitHub

Kicking off a link blog here, the way Simon Willison does it: short posts that point at something worth your time with a line on why. Less pressure than an essay, and over a year it becomes the most useful thing on the site. This is the first one.