Notes on rebuilding this site

Every once in a while I look at my personal site and realize it has accumulated far too many dependencies for a simple, static site.

The previous iteration shipped a full React runtime, two component libraries, an animation engine, and six color themes just to render a single page of text. We really don’t need all that.

What matters for a site like this

As an engineer, the qualities I care about in software are pretty simple:

1. Predictable latency. Static text over the wire should arrive and paint in a single round-trip.
2. Few moving parts. Every dependency is a future build failure when you come back six months later just to publish a blog post.
3. Clear failure modes. Plain <a href> links, semantic HTML, and zero required client JavaScript mean the page works everywhere.

// Keep the critical path boring.
func serve(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    w.Header().Set("Cache-Control", "public, max-age=3600")
    http.ServeFile(w, r, "index.html")
}

The new setup

This version is built with Astro, authored in Markdown, and styled with a single CSS file using custom properties. Search runs against a small precomputed JSON index that only loads when you press ⌘K or /.

Now there is nothing left to configure—just a folder of .md files to write in.