Building This Site in Public

This site used to be a portfolio in the classic sense: a hero, three projects, a contact link. It did its job, but it had nowhere to put the thing I actually want to do more of — writing down what I learn while building.

So I rebuilt it as a platform: blog, projects, and learning notes in one place, with a design system instead of one-off pages.

The stack

The old site was a Vite + React single-page app. It was fast to build and fast to load, but a client-rendered blog is invisible to search engines and awkward to share. The rebuild is:

• Next.js App Router — static rendering for every article
• TypeScript end to end
• Tailwind CSS v4 — the whole theme is ~30 CSS variables
• MDX — articles are files in a content/ folder, with components when I need them
• Decap CMS — so publishing doesn't require touching git

The design tokens live in one place. This is the entire dark theme:

@theme {
  --color-bg: #090909;
  --color-surface: #101010;
  --color-ink: #f5efe6;
  --color-gold: #e2b64f;
  /* ...borders, radii, fonts */
}

What stayed

The parts of the old site that felt like mine survived: the warm off-white ink, the gold accent, the projects, and the general rule that nothing should glow, bounce, or parallax without a reason.

What's next

The plan from here, roughly in order:

1. More DSA and system-design notes — short ones, not essays
2. A proper write-up of the health-data pipeline in Forge
3. RSS, so you can subscribe without an algorithm in between

If you're reading this, the rebuild shipped. The code is on GitHub, and the writing lives here now.