I rebuilt this site so that publishing costs one file

The previous version of this site was one index.html file, 41,000 characters long, with the CSS bolted on beside it. It worked. It had been working for years. That is exactly the problem — it worked well enough that I never rewrote it, and badly enough that I never added to it.

Every time I finished something worth showing, publishing it meant opening that file, finding the right nest of <div>s, and hand-copying the markup of the project above it. I did that maybe four times in three years. The friction did not stop me from building things. It stopped me from telling anyone about them.

The actual requirement

So the requirement was never “make it look better.” It was:

Adding something new should cost one file and no thinking.

Everything else followed from that. Static, because GitHub Pages is free and I do not want to operate a server for a personal site. Markdown, because I already write in it. Content collections with a schema, because I want the build to fail loudly when I forget a field rather than silently render an empty card.

What it runs on

Astro, building to static HTML. Content lives in src/content/ as markdown with typed frontmatter. Images get optimised at build time. Most pages ship no JavaScript at all — the mobile menu, the theme toggle and the copy-email button are the only exceptions, and each of them degrades to a working page if the script never loads.

The whole thing deploys through a GitHub Action on push to master. There is no build step I have to remember to run and no artifact I have to remember to commit.

The part I care about more

Rebuilding the site meant re-reading everything I had written about my own work, and most of it was written in the flattened voice of a résumé. “Developed a Go HTTPS server to streamline integration testing.” True, and it tells you nothing about the two weeks of finding out why the old process was slow, or the argument about whether it was worth fixing at all.

The interesting part of engineering is almost never the artifact. It is the constraint you were under and the thing you chose not to do. That is what I want this site to be for now.