A new sheet of paper
· 1 min read · meta · engineering
I rebuilt this site from scratch. The old version was a single-page app with a dark, neon, terminal-styled theme — and two real problems.
The first was invisible but serious: the server sent an empty HTML shell. Search engines, LinkedIn previews, and anyone on a slow connection got a blank page while JavaScript loaded. For a site whose whole job is to be found and skimmed by busy people, that's disqualifying.
The second was that it didn't look like me. It looked like a template — the same glowing-green aesthetic every developer portfolio seems to converge on.
What the new one does
- Renders on the server. Every page is real HTML before any JavaScript runs. View source and you'll see the actual words.
- Draws itself from data. The chart near the top of the home page is my last 52 weeks of GitHub commits, one point per week. Quiet weeks show. That's the point — it's a record, not a brochure.
- Edits without deploys. Projects, notes, skills, and every field on this site live in Postgres behind a small admin panel I built, so updating it is a form, not a commit.
The design brief I gave myself was "an instrument, not a poster": Space Grotesk for text, JetBrains Mono for data and labels, one lime accent, a dark sheet by default and a paper-grey one on request — and almost nothing that moves.
More notes to come, mostly about machine learning coursework and the occasional contest problem. The work page is filling in next.