This is the first post on the new version of this site, so it seems fair to start with how it's built and why.
Starting over, smaller
The old site had Three.js, Framer Motion, Lottie animations, and a 3D scene on the home page. It looked impressive for about two seconds, and then you waited for it to load. For a page whose job is "here's who I am and what I've written," that trade made no sense.
So I rebuilt it with one question in mind: what's the least this site needs to do?
The setup
- Next.js with the App Router, exported as plain static HTML. No server to run, nothing to scale — just files on a host.
- Server Components everywhere. There isn't a single
"use client"in the codebase. Every page renders at build time, so the browser gets finished HTML instead of a JavaScript bundle that has to build the page itself. - Tailwind CSS for styling, with colors and type sizes as design tokens so light and dark mode come for free.
- TypeScript, because even a small project is nicer when the editor catches mistakes for me.
- MDX for posts. Writing something new means adding one
.mdxfile and pushing. No CMS, no database.
Why performance first
Speed is the part of a website people feel before they read a single word. A fast page feels respectful of someone's time; a slow one feels like it's asking for patience it hasn't earned.
It's also a good constraint. Every time I was tempted to add something — an animation, a library, a widget — the question became: is this worth what it costs on load? Almost always the answer was no, and the site got simpler for it.
The result is a PageSpeed Insights performance score of 100 on desktop and 99 on mobile — with 100 for accessibility, best practices, and SEO on both — and I didn't have to fight for it. Most of it came from not adding things rather than optimizing them afterward.
What's next
Now that publishing is as easy as writing a Markdown file, the plan is to actually write — more technical notes, and eventually some thoughts on AI and how I'm using it in my work.